


remember me

by hupsoonheng



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Amnesia, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Established Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Established Relationship, Gardens & Gardening, Good Draco Malfoy, Happy Ending, Legilimency, M/M, Obliviation, POV Draco Malfoy, POV Harry Potter, Reformed Draco Malfoy, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-05-12 18:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19235140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: On a chilly day in October, Draco kisses Harry goodbye before he goes on yet another dangerous, undercover mission with the Aurors.And then Harry doesn't come back.Only Draco believes that Harry isn't dead, and pours himself into finding his husband despite his friends' pleas to move on and grieve properly. What he finds at the end of that work, though, is not at all what he wanted.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so excited to have taken part in hd wireless—my first hp fest ever! I want to give a big, happy shoutout of thanks to my wonderful alpha reader, G, who let me ramble endlessly every moment I got stuck, and to my excellent beta reader, K/N, who never lets me get away with anything, and rightly so. I'd also like to thank matsinko for this excellent prompt, to which I can only hope i've done justice: 
> 
> Prompt: 'Remember Me' - Coco  
>  _Harry and Draco are finally in a steady, happy relationship until one day Harry is sent on an undercover Auror mission.. and doesn't return. X amount of years later, people stop looking, thinking Harry had just ran away. But Draco knows Harry wouldn't._  
>  _Alternatively, X amount of years later, when everyone had stopped looking, Harry reappears out of thin air._

It's not the first time Harry's gone on a dangerous, undercover mission. Truthfully, most of Harry's school years could count as one long dangerous, undercover mission. 

In the week leading up to the mission, though, Draco finds himself spending as much time as he can by his husband's side. This includes crowding Harry when he's only trying to make coffee in the morning, sitting right beside him on the sofa even when there's plenty of unoccupied seating around the room (including the other side of the sofa), and draping himself all over Harry's side of the bed as they're both falling asleep. 

"Miss me already?" Harry sighs, on the third day of Draco's extra-clingy campaign. 

"Miss you? Never," Draco replies, taking an aggressive sip of Harry's tea and setting his chin on Harry's shoulder. "Don't think so highly of yourself. You're just comfortable." 

"Right." Harry rolls his eyes and makes his way to the living room as gracefully as any man might with a six foot barnacle hanging off his left shoulder. 

"Who needs a duvet when I've got you, eh?" Harry says with a grimace on the fifth night, peeling Draco's arm off his chest. "You'd think it was mid-July with how overheated you've got me." 

"Oh, I'll overheat you," Draco mutters, putting his arm right back over Harry's naked chest. He's too tired to follow through on his vague promise, but it makes Harry chuckle anyway. 

"It's like I married a cat," Harry groans, scrabbling for his wand on the bedside table, which makes it roll off and clatter to the floor. "Ah, fuck. Draco, cast a cooling charm, will you? My wand's gone under the bed." But Draco's too sleepy to answer. 

"Be good while I'm gone," Harry says on the seventh morning, running his thumb over Draco's chin. "No extradimensional portals. No dark allegiances. No megalomaniacal plots." 

"I can't promise any of that, least of all the extradimensional portals," Draco snorts, giving that thumb a brief kiss. "You shouldn't have married a dark wizard if you wanted to avoid all that." 

"I know, I'm a fool." Harry presses his lips to Draco's high forehead, then to Draco's own mouth. They spend a few more minutes at the door simply caressing each other with lips and hands, chaste but full of meaning, before Draco shivers in the chill of the October morning air. 

"Alright," Harry laughs, "get back inside before you catch your death of cold. I'm going to work." And he pulls away, starting the walk down the secluded cottage path. 

"Harry," Draco says, catching the other man by the wrist with a note of warning in his voice. "Don't do anything stupid." 

"It's the only thing I know how—" 

"I'm not flirting now, you arse. I mean it." Draco squeezes his fingers tight around Harry's wrist, as if to better prove how much he means it. "I know you like to fling yourself into the fray to prove how much of a hero you are, but for once, think of your suffering husband and be at least a bit of a coward." 

"You _would_ like that," Harry snickers. "I promise, Draco, that I'll try my very hardest not to die again." 

"It's not funny," Draco murmurs, but Harry steps up onto the threshold of their home again and draws him in for one more kiss. 

"I know. I'll be careful." 

Six months. Six months of Harry gone, undercover for the Ministry and out of contact. Draco thinks he's meant to work as an Unspeakable, with all his Harry-ness Polyjuiced into oblivion. It's for Harry's safety, of course; the middle-aged savior of the wizarding world can hardly comb his hair forward and stride unnoticed into a den of ne'er-do-wells. And of course, Draco doesn't even know if that'll be the case. Harry's not allowed to tell him anything. 

The first day Harry is gone, Draco wishes he'd forced Harry's hand, made him quit his vile Auror career and settle into something with a lower fatality and injury rate, like poison-tasting. He and Harry had wasted so many years of their lives loathing each other as Malfoy and Potter that Draco gets desperate for Harry's company after long enough. 

Six long months. 

"No news is good news," Hermione reminds him, when she catches him scanning the Prophet a little too intensely over tea at the Weasley-Granger home in Chudley. 

"Listen to Granger," Pansy says, when he complains to her later about Hermione's apparent mind-reading capabilities. 

"He's Harry, isn't he? He always comes out alright," Ron assures him the next time he’s over, because Hermione told him about Draco's obsessive checking of the paper. 

"How embarrassing to be so worried," Blaise drawls, over tea a week later. Draco agrees, all the more for being called out on it so many times. 

Draco does his best to take their words to heart, even Blaise's, since he knows they translate to _You know he'll be fine._

Six months. Draco spends most of those six months in the garden, weeding and pruning and planting and watering to keep his worst fears at bay. He works without magic, because otherwise the work goes by too quickly, and he's left with his thoughts again. Harry will be so happy to see how much their garden has flourished when he comes back, given he hasn't much of a green thumb himself. It also means that when company comes calling, they often have to talk to Draco as he's kneeling in the dirt. Hermione and Ron are for it, Ron even pulling on a pair of gardening gloves himself to pitch in, but Pansy and Blaise aren't quite as on board. Pansy teases him, a Malfoy working with his hands, and Blaise complains of the sun, the bugs, the humidity, of having to point his voice down and ruining his posture. He notes they don't stop coming over, though, letting him ramble about everything and anything, and responding in kind. Good friends, even when they're annoying ones as well. 

And then six months are up. Any day, now, Draco will hear the creak of the gate that needs oiling, and Harry will be coming down the cottage path, looking exhausted but happy to be home. Draco will pretend Harry's only been gone a day, stand steadfastly ignoring him—oh, who is he kidding? He'll fly down the path, and collide with Harry so hard that Harry will have to pick him up, _then_ tell Harry how annoying it's been to have to tidy the house all by himself so he'd better not leave again. He won't have tea ready, but together they'll have a meal done up in no time. After all, Draco's left the kitchen just the way Harry likes it, with little caches of spices in tactical spots around the stove, his favorite pan ready on his favorite burner. 

"Any day now," Hermione reminds him. 

"Your husband's always one for dramatic entrances," Pansy points out. 

"Harry's probably tying up loose ends," Ron snorts. "Can't leave well enough alone, the bugger." 

"I mean, he's _probably_ not dead. He's very bad at dying, historically," says Blaise. 

Six months become seven. The Ministry has no answers for Draco, but his friends are probably right. Harry takes his cases seriously, and he'd never pull out of a mission over something as trivial as a deadline. 

Eight months. The case must be deep. Draco thinks about expanding the garden and starting an orchard. 

Nine months. He takes Dreamless Sleep to force himself to get rest. He doesn't find anything to say when his friends visit anymore. 

Ten months. Draco plants a mulberry sapling at the back of the garden after pushing the boundaries of the property out with an Expansion Charm. Harry's going to be so surprised to find an entire tree has grown while he's been gone, never mind that it got a head start. 

Eleven months. Mrs. Weasley brings him a mountain of cooked food after Ron apparently tells her about Draco's empty kitchen. Draco realizes, after she's left, that she's put away Harry's spices and hung up the pan on the stove. 

A year. A year since Harry's departure, since he kissed Draco on the threshold of their little blue cottage and promised he'd be careful. The Ministry finally admits they've had no contact from Auror Potter in the past eight months. 

And because the Ministry can't admit they seem to have misplaced Britain's most famed modern wizard— _Think of the fallout! Think of the panic!_ they say—no search is launched. When Draco presses that he ruddy well doesn't care about "the panic" if he hasn't got a husband anymore, he's told that putting out a search for Harry Potter could jeopardize his mission, if it's still underway. 

His friends don't have any more platitudes to give him. 

When Harry Potter has been gone for three long, torturous years, Hermione helps Draco arrange a funeral for an empty casket. 

"He's not dead," Draco says, even as he picks out the wood for the coffin that will be inhabited by the memory of Harry. 

Hermione sighs, and gives him a choice between peace lilies and orchids. He chooses the lilies. 

The news is finally broken. Harry Potter is presumed dead, after a hushed-up disappearance, and the fact that it breaks via the front page of the Daily Prophet means that Draco can't refuse to mourn in peace. Although the masses are held back fifty solid meters from the funeral, he can still feel their eyes on his back, still makes him feel as though he might as well be burying the casket right in the middle of a public thoroughfare. 

"It's okay to cry," Pansy tells Draco, squeezing his hand as he returns from being the first to pour a shovelful of dirt into the grave hole; public opinion is apparently that Harry Potter deserves to have a mausoleum all his own, but even if Harry were truly dead, Draco knows he'd hate that. So he has a tombstone, like anyone else. 

"He's alive," Draco says to Pansy, and that seems to make _her_ cry, instead. 

"Oh, Draco," she says, which is something Hermione's said, too, and Blaise, and Ron, and Mrs. Weasley, and everyone else he's ever told that his husband is not dead. 

He'd feel it, if Harry's life force had been snuffed out somewhere. He's sure of it. And so, even as he attends Harry's funeral, stony amid a sea of wailing and sobbing, he considers his next move. 

Draco's been working on a tracking spell since the one year anniversary of Harry leaving to go undercover, is the thing. His progress has been slow, because no one would help him with it, and because he's learned to keep the project to himself to avoid being categorized as crazy. 

He sits, after the funeral, in his empty husbandless house and whispers to his wand, " _Find Harry._ " No fancy Latin to be misinterpreted, no flourishes on Old English or Greek words, just his simplest desire put to magic. _Find Harry._

The third reason the spell took so long to construct is because it's powerful. As it leaves Draco's wand, it embarks on a trip around every inch of the globe, hunting for Harry's magic, and his alone. It will seek him where the air is thinnest, and where the water is darkest. It will look for him in every crowded city and every lonely plain. Wherever Harry is on this planet, Draco's spell will find him someday, dead or alive. And when it does, it will open a portal—all Draco will have to do is step through. 

From then on, Draco finds a sort of calm that his social circle mistakes for acceptance of Harry's death. Pansy reminds him, privately, that if he needs to cry, she won't make fun of him, or tell anyone, and it makes Draco laugh that those are her biggest priorities. The mulberry sapling has become an impudent teenager of a tree, and Ron has named it Maisie, which no one asked him to do, and yet the name sticks. Neville isn't really one of Draco's friends, but one day he's in Draco's garden anyhow, listening to Ron extoll how much he's learned about gardening and how proud he is of Maisie. Draco smirks to himself amid the herbs. 

Blaise is the only one who sees through him. "You're up to something," he says over tea, lounging across the sage green sofa with narrowed eyes. 

"If I wasn't up to something, I wouldn't be a Slytherin," Draco replies with a delicate sip. "Are you ever not up to something yourself?" 

"Touché," Blaise snorts. "But what I'm up to hasn't got to do with my dead husband. It's been a year, Draco." 

"No, it's been four years since his disappearance," Draco corrects. 

"I knew it. I knew this whole peaceful act was a sham." Blaise sets his tea cup down on the coffee table just firmly enough to underscore his last word. "Draco." 

"It's not a sham!" Draco sets his cup aside as well, though more because his hands are trembling. "I know he's alive, and I've—" 

"You've what? Hired a private investigator? Sent some dogs out after him?" Blaise interrupts. "I am trying, Draco, to be as sensitive as everyone else, and Hecate knows it's hardly in me to tread lightly. But you are in dangerous waters." 

"I can believe what I like." Draco crosses his arms, his legs, until he feels like an irritable pretzel. "My husband is alive. You don't have to agree, until the day he comes back through that door, and then you'll have to tell me how stupid you were to tell me to just _accept_ that I was a widower. You'll see." 

Blaise sits up and leans forward, scrubbing his hands down his face. "I am _worried_ for you, Draco, I'm not trying to tell you off. You need to let this go." 

Draco stands, so abruptly he almost surprises himself. "What I need to do," he says as he tugs the sitting rumples out of his clothes, "is tend to my garden. You may join me quietly or find the door." 

"Draco." 

"I need to put bird netting down. You may help me if you like, though I'm sure you'd rather die than work with your hands." 

"Draco, you're not well." 

"I suppose that's goodbye, then, Blaise." Draco raises his hand as he heads to the bare, now unused kitchen, toward the back door that lets out into the garden. "Goodbye." 

Blaise doesn't come round again, not by himself. He comes with Pansy, and sometimes with the whole gaggle of Pansy, Ron, and Hermione, but he eyes Draco with such disappointment that Draco finds himself avoiding Blaise in his own home. He just needs Harry to come home, and then this whole thing will blow over. 

And then it happens. 

It's a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in early summer, not any day of particular note. Draco is reading a Muggle gardening magazine with a cup of black tea, thinking idly about making mushroom polenta for supper later. And now, there's also a tear in the fabric of Draco's living room, a jagged window looking out over a blustery, rocky landscape with sparse grass and an ocean view. 

The tea slips from his fingers, the cup shattering between his feet. 

Within hasty moments, Draco is shod, cloaked, and armed with his wand, striding through the portal without so much as a message left to anyone who might look for him. The irony is not lost on him, but this is _it_. Five years of being deprived of the love of his life, and now—now they'll be over. He can start a new chapter in his life, if not pick up where the previous, interrupted chapter left off. Everything will be okay now. 

The wind is vicious on the other side of the portal, icy as Draco's cloak billows and snaps in its capricious grasp, and yet still it's drowned out by the crash of the ocean at the bottom of the cliff he's standing on. Draco tastes salt on the air. Draco sees, as he turns around, that he's on a tiny crag of an island, and the only thing to look at besides sea and sky and rock is a dilapidated shack in the center of the land. 

That has to be where Harry is. Draco strides toward it immediately, heart just behind his teeth. He's always passively wondered why Harry wouldn't have come home if he's as alive as Draco claims, wondered if Harry had been hurt, brainwashed, mutilated beyond even his own recognition. Wondered, on some dark nights, if Harry had seen an easy way out of a disappointing marriage to a terrible and stupid man. 

But he can't think about any of those things. He can only think of putting his hand on the door to the shack, which doesn't have a door knob so much as a hole to pull it by. 

The inside of the shack doesn't match the outside. Inside feels like a real house, with sturdy walls and a hodgepodge of chintzy furniture. Of course there'd be magic in play; no one could survive in what looked like an abandoned fishing hut all this time. There are no stairs, so whatever dimensional charms are in place aren't terribly advanced, but they certainly serve their purpose. It looks a bit like the ground floor of the Burrow in here, Draco realizes. 

"Harry?" Draco calls through the small house, and wishes he could quiet the sound of his heartbeat as he listens hard for a response. Nothing. 

He takes cautious steps deeper into the house. Rather than a kitchen, living room and dining room, there's a single room containing the elements of all three that Draco might call a den. A table by a shabby armchair holds a leatherbound journal; it looks handmade, and like it's seen a fair amount of use. He touches a single, hesitant finger to its edge, and when no curse flies from its cover, he picks it up and lets it fall open to a random page. 

_There's a wedding band on my finger. I must be married to Ginny, I think, but I can't go back the way I am._

"What—?" Draco whispers, tracing the letters with one finger. The handwriting looks like Harry's, only shakier, less focused. 

The front door slams open. Draco had left it ajar, he suddenly realizes, and if that's Harry, he must think there's an intruder. Draco tucks the journal into his cloak without thinking, and shouts, "Harry?" before rushing back into the entryway. 

And stops. 

There, framed by the rocky wilderness just behind him, stands Harry Potter. Hair long, beard full, glasses cracked, but _his_ Harry. Draco surges toward him, every nerve in his body singing its joy, his mind coming apart because it's Harry, Harry, _Harry—_

"Not a step closer!" Harry barks, his wand raised at the end of a tense arm. Draco comes skidding to a halt, holding his hands up, and he looks Harry over frantically. He doesn't look hurt. He looks remarkably healthy, in fact, for someone living alone on an uninhabited island. His eyes are hard, and stranger still, full of recognition. 

"Malfoy," Harry spits. 

What a fool he was for using a spell he'd put together himself, without expert Hermione's help. What an idiot, for stepping through any portal after years of magical education. He must have entered another timeline, one where he and Harry had never reconciled, had never fallen in love, gotten married. He let the portal seal behind him, and now he's trapped here, further than ever before from his own true Harry. 

Except Draco recognizes the ring on the hand not holding a wand. He remembers sliding that ring on Harry's finger as Harry grinned through his tears of happiness, and even before that he remembers picking out the ring set with Harry, remembers pointing at it in the case and getting Harry's nod of approval. 

This is worse than the wrong timeline. This is a nightmare. 

"Harry," Draco whispers, Harry's wand still pointed at his throat. "What are you doing?" 

"How did you find me?" Harry snarls, jabbing his wand at Draco. 

"It was—" Draco swallows, and again, and tries to wet his suddenly dry mouth. "It was a spell I made." 

"A spell _you_ made." Harry laughs, cold and humorless. "Do you think I'm stupid?" 

"Never, Harry." The words come out in a voice so small it’s nearly inaudible. 

Harry grunts, searching Draco's face. "Who else knows I'm here?" 

"No one." 

"Liar." Harry taps the end of his wand against the soft underside of Draco's jaw. "Have you come to kill me, then? Take revenge for your sorry excuse of a father going where he belongs?" 

"Harry," Draco says, soft and wavering, "what's happened to you?" 

"Stop calling me Harry! You don't have the right!" Harry shouts, and Draco winces as the wand jabs him in the esophagus. "What's your game, Malfoy? Eh? Did you do this to me?" 

"Do what?" Draco shuffles back, just enough to get clear of Harry's wand. 

"This! I'm—I'm old! I've got aches, and crow's feet, and there's gray in my beard! I've got a bloody _ring_ on my finger!" Harry brandishes his left hand with its scars, the ring binding him to Draco. "But as _I_ remember, I'm twenty-three!" 

A boulder drops into the bottom of Draco's stomach, drags it down with its weight. "How long have you been in this house?" He doesn't dare call Harry by any name, now. 

Harry doesn't answer at first, glaring suspiciously, and then, "Five years." 

"You've been Obliviated," Draco says, just as it dawns on him. "Har—" He stops himself. "You're thirty-eight. Not twenty-three. Please put your wand down," he adds, with a glance downward. 

Harry grits his teeth. "And then what? You'll hex me? Not a chance, Malfoy." 

"You've been alone," Draco says slowly, as he moves an equally slow hand toward Harry's wand, "for a long time. I've come to take you home." 

"Where's Ron, then? Where's Hermione? They'd be the ones to bring me home!" His voice is frantic, now, losing the intimidation he'd had when he first came through the door, though his wand is still a very real threat. "I wouldn't go anywhere with _you._ "

He can't cry. Not yet. Not now. _Please just come with me,_ he readies himself to say, with deep breaths. 

"Why haven't you come back in all this time?" he asks instead. 

Harry startles, enough that Draco can finally push his wand down without meeting resistance. "I—what do you care?" 

"Please, Harry," Draco pleads, in spite of Harry's previous reaction to his first name. "I need you to come home." He can't cry, but he is anyway, tears burning his eyes as he reaches for Harry's left hand. 

"Don't touch me!" Harry snaps, pulling away. Draco feels riddled with knives, another one added every time Harry rejects him, and this one slides home right between his ribs, burying itself in his heart. But he holds up his own left hand. 

"Harry, please." The ring on Draco's finger matches Harry's. The only piece of gold he'll ever wear, it's engraved with a single branch of holly and hawthorn each, twined together. The engraving was a custom job—there are no other rings like theirs. 

"What are you showing me?" Harry growls. "Someone married you? Can't say I don't pity—" 

His eyes focus, narrowing as they take in the engraving, then going wide with recognition. Realization. _Horror._

"No," Harry moans, voice small. He reaches for Draco's hand, and Draco mirrors him, ready to clasp Harry's hand. Instead Harry grabs at the ring, trying to yank it off, and Draco yelps. "It's a glamour charm! Or transfigured! How did you know how to make it look, Malfoy? Been spying on me while I suffer through missing decades of my life?!" 

Draco struggles against Harry's strength to snatch his hand away, and cradles it to his chest as he stares at Harry, panting. 

"You're disgusting," Harry sneers. "Even if I was gay, I'd marry just about any man before I'd ever even look at you. I can think of at least ten men worth a thousand of you _apiece_. What a pathetic trick." 

Draco sinks to the floor, still holding the hand wearing his wedding ring, squeezing his eyes shut against Harry's words. He can still see, painted across the backs of his eyelids, how happy and beautiful Harry was on the day of their wedding, can remember when Harry slid this ring onto his finger in return. 

"Why would you even try it, Malfoy? What's to be gained? Because that's what everything you do is about. Getting something out of others." 

_No extradimensional portals,_ Harry had said on the last day Draco had seen him, before sweetly kissing his forehead, then his lips. He supposes he's broken that promise, coming here. 

He thinks of himself and Harry seated in front of the hearth, a blanket made by Mrs. Weasley drawn over their laps, going over plans for their wedding day; Harry had thought a seating chart was silly, but Draco knew Pansy ought to be kept away from the Weasleys for the sake of peace. He thinks of Harry kissing him, affectionate and chaste; he thinks of Harry kissing him again, hungry and passionate. 

" _Expecto Patronum,_ " he says, quiet under the barrage of cruelty coming from Harry. A silver rabbit leaps from the end of his wand under his cloak, and sits expectantly in front of him. "Go to Ron, or Hermione, whichever you can find first," he tells the rabbit. And then, touching the rabbit's throat, he says, "I've found Harry. My Patronus has the coordinates. Please Apparate as quickly as you can." 

Harry misses the words, apparently, because he only notices the rabbit once it's bounding for the door. 

"A rabbit Patronus?" he snorts. "That tracks. A creature that runs and hides at the slightest hint of danger." 

That's not what Harry had said when Draco's Patronus had changed its shape from a peacock. _A rabbit keeps its family safe,_ he'd said. 

Draco walks past Harry with tense, drawn-up shoulders, but Harry doesn't attack him, just watches him with wary eyes as Draco heads out to the cliff's edge. He's just in time to see the rabbit dash across the waves in long, supernatural hops, before it disappears into the mist. If they're as close to England as he thinks they are, it won't be long before backup arrives. 

"Who did you call?" Harry demands as he walks up behind Draco. "I'm not afraid to fight anyone you've summoned, you know." 

"Ron or Hermione. Whichever she finds first." Harry could so easily push Draco off the cliff to his death right now, and he thinks he'd welcome it. "Since you won't go with me." 

"Too right I won't." But Harry doesn't push him, hanging back like a sulking teenager. Which, Draco supposes with a sad smirk, he is. He says he's twenty three, but if he woke up an eighteen year old and hasn't seen anyone since, he's probably not much different now than he was five years ago. 

Draco breathes evenly on the cliff, eyes half-lidded as he takes in the sharp ocean air. There's a somber peacefulness here, actually; he supposes if he had woken up fifteen years in the future, confused and paranoid, he might also come to a place like this to figure it out. 

Within the hour, a soft pop of displaced air heralds the arrival of Hermione, and Draco wills himself not to let himself fall off the cliff's edge after all when Harry runs to her with glee. 

"Harry?" Hermione stares at Harry as she arrives, her tight voluminous curls eddying around her bloodless face. "Oh, _Harry!"_ And she she breaks into a run, arms flung out so she can wrap them around Harry as she buries her face in his chest. Harry flings his arms up, his face inscrutable, but he lets her. When she comes up for air, her face is wet, screwed up with crying. 

"Oh, Harry, we thought you were dead! I can't believe it's you!" She squeezes him tight again, as if to prove to herself again he's really there. "I'm so sorry, Harry, we all gave up on you, and you were here all along!" 

All Harry does is search Hermione’s face, expression still oddly flat. 

Then Hermione sniffles. "All of us except Draco, I mean, he never stopped looking for you. Oh, Harry, you must be so happy to see him again, but why haven't you come _back?"_

Now Harry frowns. "'Draco'?" 

"Yes, your husband," Hermione huffs, pointing at Draco where he's been watching from a distance. "Why haven't you come home, if you were this close, Harry?" 

"Hermione!" Harry cries, as if she'd said some horrible slur. "Why would you say something like that?" 

"Because I had to attend your funeral!" Hermione bites back. "So if you feel put-upon because one of your best friends wants an explanation for letting her think you were dead—" 

"I'm not married to _Malfoy!"_ Harry says, voice tinged with desperation. "That's _his_ bollocks story!" 

Hermione steps away from Harry completely, and his arms fall to his sides. "Harry—" 

"He doesn't remember," Draco says at last, voice flat. "Anything. Ask him how old he is." 

Hermione looks at Draco in alarm, then turns back to Harry. "You know how old you are, don't you?" she asks, faintly. 

"I've gathered I'm older than I think," Harry says with a shrug. "But by my count, I'm twenty-three." 

"Oh, Harry," Hermione says again, twisting her hands together with a pained expression. "I'm so sorry. Is this why you never came home?" 

Harry locks his hands together behind his waist. “How do I know you’re not Goyle in disguise, or something?” 

Hermione stops. “What?” 

“Goyle's never been an actor,” Draco snorts to himself. 

“You may not have hexed me yet,” Harry says, producing his wand again, “but I don’t know that you’re Hermione.” 

“Harry—oh, fine.” Hermione plants her fists on her hips. “Ask me anything you like.” 

“When did you realize you were in love with Ron?” Harry asks, holding his wand up. 

“The birds,” Hermione replies, and Draco realizes for all he’s learned about Harry’s friends, he has no idea what she means. “ _Oppugno_ ,” she adds with a wry little smile. 

“Could have tortured that one out of Hermione,” Harry says with a shrug. 

“Veritaserum, then,” Hermione says, hands going to her purse. But Harry holds up his other hand. 

“Haven’t got any, won’t trust any you’ve got.” There’s a waver in his voice that reminds Draco of how young Harry’s mind is. This truly is not his seasoned Auror husband—this is a boy running on luck and hard-won experience. “If you’re really Hermione, and you want me to trust you, you’ll sit here until I know you’re not Polyjuiced.” He points at the ground with his wand. “No food, no drink, no spells.” 

“Fine.” Hermione begins to fold herself down to kneel on the hard earth, and tugs at Draco’s robes to ask him to sit with her. Harry comes just close enough to collect both their wands. 

“At least he didn’t mention how old we must look to him,” Hermione murmurs to Draco, watching Harry take his seat several feet away from them, all three wands bunched in his fist. 

It takes three hours, during which Draco’s legs and hips fall asleep over and over no matter how he sits on the uncomfortable, rocky ground, before Harry finally agrees that Hermione is Hermione. He doesn’t seem to have the same concern for Draco’s identity, presumably because trust was never at stake there. 

"I didn't know if it was safe to come look for you, to be honest," Harry says, as he helps Hermione to her feet. "I thought I'd been caught in some kind of time traveling hex, and well—I didn't want to muck anything up. You, of all people, know how delicate time is. I didn't you or anyone else to die, or vanish, or anything else on my account." 

Hermione hesitates, glancing at Draco again before saying to Harry, "I'm just so happy you're alive, and that we've found you." She holds her hand out. "Will you come home?" 

"Promise there's no time travel to worry about?" Harry says, taking her hand. "I won't erase you from the timeline by sneezing at the wrong time or anything?" 

"Promise," she agrees with a smile, then holds her hand out to Draco. "Come on then," she says, and Harry scowls. It makes Draco want to take his place on this godforsaken rock, be the new steward of Harry's seaside cottage. Hermione sighs, and lets go of Harry to approach Draco. 

"Draco," she says, just barely audible over the crash of the surf behind them as she puts firm fingers to his jaw to make him look at her. "I know this can't be easy for you." 

"He called me disgusting," Draco says, watching Harry give him such a look of loathing that tears prick his eyes. "Pathetic. Said even if he were gay—Hermione, he doesn't even know his own sexuality anymore." 

"Something happened to Harry, but that doesn't mean it isn't _fixable,_ " she insists, turning his face down to her again. "We will fix this. You'll get Harry back." 

"I don't think he wants me to get him back." 

"Well," Hermione says, setting her mouth in a flat line, "what if we figure all that out somewhere that _isn't_ a cliff off the coast of Galway?" 

"I'm going home," Draco says. "You should probably take Harry to the Burrow." 

"You should be at the Burrow, too!" Hermione replies, but Draco shakes his head. 

"I can't, Hermione. Just take him to the Burrow, let Ron and Molly go berserk without all the dour husband talk." He makes an attempt at a wan smile. "You'll know exactly where to find me." _In the garden._

He Apparates before Hermione makes it back to Harry. 

And when he gets home to the house that has been waiting to welcome Harry back, and will go on waiting still, he cries until he throws up, then cries until he falls asleep.

⚘

The news breaks within three days. The Boy Who Lived has become The Man Who Lived Again, and the wizarding world goes into a weeklong celebration. Draco only knows because he never canceled his Daily Prophet subscription.

He wonders what it must have been like at the Burrow, when Harry came back. Molly must have gone absolutely spare. Ron must have wept, and Draco bets he called Harry a wanker through those tears. For them, it would be a sad but funny quirk that Harry couldn't remember any of them past the Battle of Hogwarts, not an insurmountable agony. 

Pansy and Blaise come by during that week-long celebration, during which Draco never leaves his home. Draco is poor company, and he knows it, is sorry for it, but his friends don't seem to hold it against him, bringing him baked goods and wine. Well, Pansy brings him wine, then Blaise tells her Draco oughn't have alcohol lying about the house in a voice he thinks Draco can't hear. 

Molly makes a visit, and just as she had within the first year of Harry's disappearance, she brings him lasagne, meat pies, hearty stews, heaps of roasted vegetables, and all other kinds of recipes usually meant to feed an army of Weasleys. She brings him desserts, too, like an enormous seven-layer trifle, a raspberry-lemon tray bake, and a rich-looking chocolate cake, all floating in behind her under miniature shielding and stasis charms as she Floos into the cottage. 

"Oh, Draco," Molly says, sighing as she takes a slow, heavy seat beside him. She was never spry in the time Draco's known her, even when she was just _The Weasel Mum_ or whatever awful dismissive thing he was taught to consider her as a child, but twenty years after the end of the war, she seems to have gotten smaller, all her aches compressed into a shrunken space. "I can understand Harry a bit, you know." 

Draco fiddles with his wand in his lap, and Molly pulls it away from him with delicate fingers to set it on the coffee table. "It hurts worse, this way," he mumbles, and she rubs his back. 

"I know, darling. But he's been through a lot. And he doesn't know the wonderful, caring man you've grown up to be." She cards her wizened fingers through the back of his hair, and he shivers. Every touch Molly gives him always feels like a gift, even now. "Don't you remember what it was like, when you were the age he thinks he is?" 

_I've been through a lot, too,_ he wants to say, but he just swallows the words, because surely missing a spouse doesn't compare to losing half a lifetime of memories. "I hate to remember that age. I like things the way they—I liked how it was, right before Harry left." 

"Things were so different then." Molly sighs again. "Your father did his best to make you as twisted as he was, and for a while, it worked. With only those memories, can you blame Harry for feeling the way he does right now?" 

"No." Without his wand to keep his hands busy, he wads up the hem of his long shirt between his fingers. "I don't blame him at all. I just want him back, Molly." His vision blurs, and the backs of his hands are suddenly wet. 

"Well, I didn't just come with food, you know," Molly says, already dabbing at Draco's eyes with a handkerchief pulled from nowhere. He screws his eyes shut and lets her. "I've got a bit of good news, sweetheart." 

Shock opens his eyes wide, and Molly nearly jabs him right in the tear duct. "Lead with that one, next time!" he splutters, but they're both giggling. "Tell me!" 

"We've taken Harry to St. Mungo's, of course, and while it took a bit for them to make their final diagnosis, but it looks like Harry's memory is treatable." 

Warmth floods Draco like a dam breaking, and he turns to squeeze both Molly's hands. "They can fix Harry? They can bring back _my_ Harry?" 

"They said it's going to be a Legilimency treatment! How exciting!" Molly squeezes Draco's hands back. 

"Legilimency treatment?" Draco pauses. "But doesn't that require—" 

Molly hesitates. "Ron is going to get the ball rolling. Then Hermione." 

He lets his hands slip away from hers. "He won't want my help." 

"You don't know what he'll want by the time my Ron is finished with him, and especially after Hermione does her part. I'm sure they'll both work to help Harry see you in a good light." 

It doesn't make him feel any better. Molly bids him farewell after showing him each and every dish she's brought him and where she's put it away, and Draco is left inside his empty home, its only occupant. He lays about with his mind buzzing in the remaining hours before bedtime, then summons a pillow and blanket from the closet so he can sleep on the sofa. He can't bring himself to go up to the master bedroom anymore, to lay down next to no one. 

To be near the nursery. 

Not that they'd even decided yet how they'd acquire the child that would give the nursery its purpose. No, that had still been in question when Harry had left on his mission five years ago, but they'd most definitely agreed they would be parents by the time they were thirty-five. Harry was just so taken by the idea, once it had been put on the table, that he couldn't help but collect furniture, toys, knick-knacks, and all other sundry baby items in the second bedroom, bit by bit. Draco had managed to convince him not to buy baby clothes until they'd finally decided whether to adopt or have a surrogate. 

Thirty-five had been the age he'd picked out a casket to bury in his husband's name, instead, and now it seems he has no husband anymore. And so the nursery remains under a layer of dust. 

Nobody tells him when the Legilimency sessions begin, though he knows each of Harry's emotional anchors—that is to say Ron, Hermione, and himself if Harry ever lets him—must endure no less than five arduous sessions over the course of as many days. Draco spends the days waiting to hear about the beginning of the sessions in a gardening fever, with colder months approaching. He'll need to start a new compost, take cuttings, collect seeds to get the garden through winter, just to start. 

Then Ron and Hermione knock on the cottage door, and when Draco swings it open, Ron grins at him. "Part one is complete!" 

"What?" Draco is lost as the pair of them swan into his home. Ron doesn't miss a step as he heads into the kitchen, looking for his pair of gardening gloves. 

"The Legilimency healing, he means," Hermione clarifies. "His five days with Harry have finished, and as far as the Healers and Harry himself can tell us, it was a success!" 

"The squash needs harvesting," Draco says to Ron as the other man pulls his gloves on, and Ron nods before heading out into the garden. He turns back to Hermione as he walks. "What do you mean by a success, exactly?" 

"I don't mean anything by it except that Harry's recovered a good deal of his memories this past week." She follows Draco outside, and collects a big wicker basket from its place against the wall to take over to Ron. Ron's already thwacking away amid the delicatas, and Hermione puts the single squash he's managed to harvest into the basket. "It's excellent news, if you ask me." 

"If you ask anyone at all," Ron snorts. Draco gets down to his knees in the soil to add to the harvesting effort. "Whew, though! What a ride it was. I think I've recovered some lost memories, myself." 

"Harry's taking the weekend to rest," Hermione says, wrangling the squash as Ron chucks them toward the basket; sometimes he doesn't make it, and sometimes he throws the squash too hard, saved only by Hermione's quick cushioning charms. "And then—Ron! Be more careful!—it's my turn." 

"They're squash, how careful do you have to be? You'd have to chuck them against a brick wall to smash them." 

"They're little patty pans, not Hagrid's giant pumpkins. Is it really so hard to just put them in the basket?" 

"You do it, then!" 

"I would if my hands weren't too small for—" 

Ron yanks off the gloves and whisks his wand over them, shrinking them down to something more like Hermione's size. "Here you are, then, a custom fit." 

"You're unbelievable," Hermione mutters, but she accepts the gloves and shimmies past Ron to take his place. 

"What's it like?" Draco asks, finishing a cut on another stem. "The Legilimency." 

"Well, mate," Ron says, tapping the handle of the basket. "It's intense, I won't lie to you. It's like reliving all those memories, not just seeing them happen but _living them_ , and because there's two of you in there, it feels like there's somehow, I dunno, double the colors?" 

"What sort of memories did you go through?" Draco does his best to sound casually interested. 

"More pub nights than I care to admit. Going to World Cups together. Harry coming with me when I finally admitted I needed glasses," Ron says with a chuckle. "What a bastard he was about it, for someone who's been a four-eyes since before I knew him." 

"Oh," is all Draco can manage, because he'd expected— 

"When Rose was born, and Hugo, too," Ron continues. "Not that Harry was there in the room when they popped out—" 

"Use any other word, please," Hermione groans, then, "Can you just say born? Don't actually find other words." 

"—But he was there at the hospital. So were you, for Hugo's birth," Ron adds, his face suddenly solemn. "Because you two were dating by then." 

"Oh, they were, weren't they?" Hermione says, her wistful look a sharp contrast to the way she hacks at the squash vines. "God, do you remember how surprised we were?" 

"Oh, I do now, unquestionably," Ron agrees. "We went through a bit of that as well. Harry made some kind of up-his-arse speech about how he knew we weren't like to accept Draco, and I said something wise about how we're all grownups giving each other second chances." 

"No, as Molly told me, you said now wasn't the bloody time for more of his Malfoy obsession, then later on told him you couldn't believe he'd brought Draco fucking Malfoy to the birth of your child." 

"Blimey, Hermione, can't you let me get away with just one?" Ron groans. 

"I cannot, not ever," Hermione says with a fond smile in return. "It was in our pre-nup that I'm sure you never read." 

Draco's heart twists in his chest. "And how does Harry... feel?" 

Ron sighs. "I dunno, mate. We were both pretty checked out by the end, I didn't stop to ask if he'd remembered how to be in love with his old school rival yet." 

"Ron." 

"I'm being honest with him," Ron says, gesturing at Draco. "I'm not going to puff him up with horseshit and see him trying to run into Harry's arms before the time is right. It's a kindness, Hermione." 

Hermione sets her mouth in a line, looking at Draco grimly. "Ron's right, I suppose. I wouldn't advise you to think too much about it at this stage, Draco." 

"I can't believe you said I'm right," Ron chuckles. 

"I said I _suppose_ you are!" she says, with a particularly vicious saw at the vines. "But yes, we didn't tell you when we got started for a reason." 

"But you wanted to tell me about the end of the first round of treatment?" Draco cuts the last squash, placing it at the top of the small heap in the basket. 

"Well." Hermione coughs into the back of her fist, then pulls the gloves off. Ron restores them to their gigantic Ron-size. "It felt like such good news, you know? One week, then another, and by then..." 

"By then, what? Harry won't hate the sight of me anymore?" Draco pushes himself to his feet. "I think we'd better get some herbs cut, too." 

Ron trundles off with the basket of patty pan while Hermione follows Draco to the herbs. "It won't help if you think of it that way, you know. We're all doing our best." 

"I know." Draco stops at his bench to trade his knife for a pair of shears. Hermione picks up a pair as well. "But maybe what I need to work on is figuring out how to not be loved anymore." 

"Don't, Draco." She looks at the herbs at their feet. "Good lord, do you think you have enough basil?" 

"I like making my own pesto," Draco says with just a hint of defensiveness as he kneels. "And I share with Molly." 

"This is a mad amount of basil," she says with a shake of her head, but she gets down to join Draco and begins snipping. "I just want you to find, I don't know, a middle ground between having fantastical expectations and giving up. I certainly don't want you to give up." 

"If I give up, then any outcome exceeds expectations," Draco says with an arched brow. 

"Oh, stop it. I'm giving you a project." 

"Yes, Professor?" 

Hermione rolls her eyes. "Do you think you could put together a photo album? Of, you know. You and Harry?" 

Draco stills. "I'm sure I could, given I'm an adult with both hands and eyes and a reasonable sense of coordination between the lot." 

"I did think of asking you to collect memories for a Pensieve viewing, but—Harry's seen modified memories before. And I assume you don't want to let go of any of those memories. So, a photo album." She pauses. "I think that would do more to help Harry understand how you're a part of his life, more than anything Ron and I could do, honestly." 

Draco frowns, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and he and Hermione snip a few more plants in silence before Ron comes back into the garden with a new basket for them.

⚘

The photo album is the first thing to get him out of the house in two weeks. Or well, off the property, anyway, if being in the garden counts as out of the house. He heads to a crafting shop in Hogsmeade and picks up a blank photo album bound in soft leather, the color of which is set by the clerk upon purchase. Draco chooses a brilliant shade of green that reminds him of Harry's eyes, and the witch at the counter smiles gently as she says, "That's a lovely color, dear." Draco adds a fresh roll of double-sided Spellotape to his purchase, because his sticking charms wear off faster, and gives the witch a faint smile in return.

He begins by going upstairs. It's not that he's ceased going into the master bedroom altogether—after all, he hasn't moved his wardrobe downstairs—but retrieving clothes are about the only thing he's gone into the room for, keeping his eyes down as he walks. He pretends, as he enters the room this time, that he is not surrounded by his husband's memory's ghosts, and gets to his knees to pull a large, bedraggled white box out from under the bed. He grabs framed photos from the bedside table and the dresser in quick succession, and hurries back to the safety of downstairs. He collects other pictures from around the house, and brings it all to the kitchen table where the blank photo album and Spellotape are waiting for him. 

The box is full of photos, thrown in higgledy-piggledly by Harry himself. They'd agreed, once they started buying frames, to be choosy about which photos had earned the real estate of being displayed about the house, but too many photos were still too precious not to keep. Draco reaches in. 

Here, a photo of Harry at the Fantastic Zoo in Brighton, licking his scoop of ice cream right off the cone in a perpetual loop of disappointment; a kappa with its webbed hands pressed to the wall of its tank appears to be laughing at him in the background. Here, a yelping Draco in the process of dropping a magnificent roast as he pulls it from the oven; he remembers having felt so sick about it, even as Harry rushed to help him put the roast back in the pan and wait patiently while Draco went over the roast with delicate cleaning charms that would remove dirt and debris but not any of the seasoning. It had been Harry's kindness that had kept him from tearing up the photo. 

Here, a day at the shore. There are a few, documenting the worsening of Draco's sunburn in succession, and Draco snorts as he fans them out on the table. Harry had looked so gorgeous in the sun, in the water, and Draco had fried to a crisp—but then, he's reminded in the last picture he finds from the beach day, Ron had gotten just as burnt, marking their first strange bonding moment. 

Here, the oldest photos, from the place where they met as adults. Each of them had been solo vacationing in Connemara National Park—not far, in fact, from where Draco had finally found Harry. They hadn't meant to run into each other, and Draco remembered what a nasty surprise he'd found it to be, to have Harry bloody Potter ruining his holiday, encountering him again and again in what was supposed to have been the vast wilderness of Connemara. They also hadn't meant to talk to each other; before Harry had disappeared, he and Draco could never agree on who had initiated their first real conversation. They hadn't meant to grow to like each other, isolated from the rest of the wizarding world and everything that might be said about Harry and Draco laughing together after the war. 

They hadn't meant to grow fond of each other in those weeks away from everyone and everything. Draco certainly meant to kiss Harry by the time he did, though, and certainly meant to invite him to his lodgings, and Merlin, he might have meant to fall in love with him, too. 

It had been rough, transitioning from their holiday romance, built in a month of being ensconced in the Irish wilderness, to their real lives filled with terrible history, expectations, responsibilities, and very, very shocked friends. Especially Harry's. A theory that Draco had drugged Harry with some sort of lucid love potion went around, and Harry was dragged to St. Mungo's for thorough testing, but he came back with clean results save for his mild dependence on sleeping draughts. _See?_ Harry had said to his friends. _It's real._

Here, their wedding photos, stacked in their own smaller box. Harry and Draco beneath the arch, with Harry in a combination of a Muggle tuxedo and formal robes, and Draco in heavy robes embroidered with silk ribbon and silver thread. The day had been hot and he'd taken them off as soon as the ceremony was over, he remembers. Photos of all the friends Draco had gained by becoming part of Harry's world, each as wonderful and strange as his own friends, if in a much more earnest way. A particularly odd photo of Narcissa Malfoy and Molly Weasley chatting together, looking uncomfortable; such is the effect of Draco's mother, he supposes. 

A photo of the day they moved into their cottage, standing proudly together on the threshold with their arms slung about each other's shoulders, Harry beaming as Draco kisses the side of his head. Molly had taken this photo. 

Draco starts pasting photos in, scribbling around them with a self-inking quill as he goes to note dates, places, commentary on how the weather had been scorching or how Harry had just bought this particular shirt only to sacrifice it to his inability to eat neatly at an Italian restaurant. Draco peppers in, whenever he really feels it, how proud he is of Harry, and of their relationship, and how in love he is. And because he feels it near-constantly, even with Harry's recent rejection, he writes it all over the photo album. 

He fills the album end to end, packing in not just photos but old owled letters from when they were bothering each other in Connemara, from when they had started courting each other outside of the fantasy world of hols—here's the one where Harry had asked Draco to move in with a simple, short sentence, the imprint of a key folded into the parchment still there after all these years. He puts in the long letter Hermione had owled him detailing all her reservations about the relationship, warning Draco of all the ways she'd make him feel pain if he was being insincere or otherwise awful, but ultimately offering her blessing, with Ron's signature at the bottom for an easy cosign. Draco almost thinks of taking it out when he realizes he's reached the end of the album and has some more photos he'd like to put in still, but Hermione's (and Ron's) letter feels too important to the cause the album is to serve. 

Even with the blessing of Harry's closest friends, Draco still remembers the way his face burned as he apologized to them for years of harassment, abuse, stalking, undermining, and stark bigotry. He thinks of Harry's furious face on that crag in the Atlantic, Harry's accusations of plotting to murder him, and he hopes, he _prays_ , that Harry has seen it in Ron's memories, will see it in Hermione's. 

Of course, once the album is complete, he realizes he doesn't know when he'll have a chance to give it to Harry. Draco leaves it in the center of the kitchen table, supposes Ron and Hermione will give him another visit when Hermione's part of the Legilimency healing is complete. 

For now, he takes Blaise up on his dinner party invitation, and tries very hard to be sociable and present, not thinking about Harry or the photo album at all, for at least this one night. The wine helps.

⚘

A week has passed since Ron and Hermione helped Draco harvest all the squash in the garden, and he's heard nothing from either of them, nor from Molly, whom Draco knows to always have an ear for Harry's business. He can't bring himself to believe there must be something innocuous keeping them from updating him—it feels too much like the early days of Harry's disappearance.

He could, of course, owl Hermione. Or Ron. Or Molly. Anyone, really. It's just—

Well, he'd have his answer, wouldn't he? 

And the longer he goes without it, the more he knows what it is, twisting his insides with dread and panic and pure, crushing depression. 

Harry hates him. Harry _must_ hate him. The five days of Hermione's sessions with Harry are days past, now, and so too have his days of rest following the procedures. Harry will never want to see him again, and now none of their friends— _his_ friends—will talk to Draco ever again, out of respect for Harry's rekindled loathing of Draco. Maybe one of them will at least be kind enough to send back Harry's rejected wedding band so he can—so he can—

He can't think of destroying their rings, not even in a self-pitying spiral of hypotheticals. 

What he can do is garden. Even if Harry wishes Draco would blink out of existence, Draco's plants still need him. Summer is in full swing, and there's plenty more to harvest and tend to. Between the cucumber vines and radish leaves, the skin on his forearms has somehow been rubbed raw, even with gardening gloves on; the fairytale aubergines are much easier by comparison. Maisie is doing well, but she needs pruning as she grows. There's a moment, as Draco looks out across all the work he's set himself, where he realizes he doesn't remember how many times he's expanded the back yard; it feels less like a garden and more like a field. He's certainly going to have to give most of his harvest away, probably mostly to Molly. 

Draco still has flowers, though. With summer comes the peace lilies and their move to the outdoors, where Draco will keep a passive eye on them like children told to play outside. Such a temperamental plant—but they had been so important for Harry. A tribute to his mother. 

He forces himself to finish the transplant, each plant newly rooted in the patch reserved as the lilies' warm weather home, before letting his body slump to the warm soil. 

Harry hates him. Harry _hates_ him. It is the only conclusion Draco can draw, a full five days out from Hermione's last session with Harry. Harry hates Draco, who loves Harry with every fiber of his pathetic soul, and here Draco is, replanting the floral representation of Harry's mother for a man who will never see them. 

Draco lies on his back amid his flowers, looking up into the painfully clear blue sky. He could die here, let the earth claim his body, and with it every memory of Harry. The lilies could feast on how much Harry used to love touching Draco's skin, now decaying to mulch; they would grow stronger and taller with how Harry would need to be pulled to bed, nodding off over the facts of a difficult case. Even if Harry could no longer love him, the flowers would love him until there was no more of him left but the memories Harry refused to reclaim. 

The windchime over the back door—its tubes shaped like little brooms, its sail a snitch—lets Draco know someone's entered the garden. Draco stills, but he doesn't show himself. 

"Malfoy? Are you out here?" 

In an instant, Draco sits bolt upright. Harry stands uncertainly by the back door, wiggling his fingers with anxiety at his sides. Draco misses that tic, the way he misses all of Harry's idiosyncrasies. Harry looks cleaned up, his hair short and clean, his salt and pepper beard trimmed nearly to stubble. He's even gotten new glasses. 

For a moment, Harry is just taking in the sheer breadth of the expanded garden, and it doesn't hurt; Harry left long before it got this big. Draco can pretend Harry is just surprised to come home to a garden the size of an Olympic pool. 

Harry's eyes light on Draco, and there's none of the malice Draco when he first found Harry. "There you are," Harry says. His mouth does not smile. He doesn't frown, either, though. 

Draco is mute as he gets to his feet, never taking his eyes off Harry. It's his heart wedged in his throat that silences him, just shy of choking him. 

"I thought—" Harry clears his throat, and takes a seat on the garden bench against the side of the house. "Hermione said you'd be here." 

"Well, it's our house." Draco doesn't bother correcting himself. It'll always be Harry's house. "Where is Hermione?" 

"At work, I reckon. She, er, doesn't know I'm here. Not Ron, either." Harry's eyes land on the flowers around Draco's legs. "Are those lilies?" He looks up, meeting Draco's gaze. 

"For your mother," Draco says, as neutrally as he can, and is rewarded with Harry's brief smile. 

"She would have liked that, I bet." Harry leans forward, elbows on his knees. "I suppose you know I've finished my Legilimency healing sessions with Hermione." 

Draco swallows. "I haven't heard from her." 

The silence that follows feels like the pressure of the deepest oceans, pressing on Draco harder with every passing second. 

"I think," Harry says, looking out over the garden and all its happy, healthy plants, "that I am satisfied with my healing." 

Draco's ears are filled with the heavy sound of the blood rushing away from his face. "What?" 

"I thought I should be the one to tell you. It's only decent." Harry scratches his nose, as though he hasn't just delivered the latest worst news of Draco's life. "That's probably why Hermione hasn't contacted you." 

"Tell me what, exactly?" Draco's voice says from somewhere outside his body. 

Harry pauses, his gaze faltering as he looks at Draco. "I feel caught up enough. I know who I am. I'm—I'm thirty-eight, I'm gay, I'm an accomplished Auror; I'm godfather to both of Ron and Hermione's children." 

"You're my husband." It comes out before Draco can stop himself, and just as he looks at Harry's hands. 

A tan line on his left ring finger. Bare, pale brown. 

"I'd like for us to be friends, Malfoy." Harry says it so casually. 

_Friends._

"What have you done with your ring?" Draco asks it through lips that feel thick and unfeeling, much like his fingers, much like his chest, his soul peeling away from his corporeal form as he considers all the ways Harry might not have cared what the ring meant. 

"Oh! Here. Ron said I ought to give it to you." Harry fishes in the pocket of his jeans, and pulls out the wedding ring with its crossed boughs. He holds it out in the flat of his hand. "I think he's right." 

Where Draco had just felt nothing, now he burns, staring at the etched metal cradled in the valley of Harry's palm. "I don't want it." He doesn't want this final, physical evidence that his marriage is over. 

"Malfoy." 

"For fuck's sake, Harry, at least call me by my name while you're rejecting me!" Draco spits, before whipping around to hide his face from Harry. He doesn't _want_ to cry right now. 

"I'm not—Draco, I'm not rejecting you. I'm not in a relationship with you." Harry's voice is so plaintive. He says Draco's name like he has to force it across his tongue. 

Draco spins back to face him. "Five years, Harry. Five long, _torturous_ years of being the only person who always believed you were alive, even when I had to pick out your _casket_." He stalks up to Harry, who's standing now, the hand that was holding the ring now a fist clenched to his chest. "Didn't you see any of that? With Ron, or Hermione? Didn't you see, Harry, how hard I worked to get you back?" 

But Harry's eyes are cold, and he takes a step back, away from the bench and closer to the door. "I don't owe you my feelings, Malfoy." 

And that's it. There's nothing Draco can say to that, because it's true. He falls to his knees at the edges of the garden, his chest full of the weight of Harry's rejection. 

"I did see," Harry says, a bit kinder now, "that you've become a good man, in all this time. Molly loves you, you know, and that's no small thing. And this garden is—Malfoy, it's wonderful." 

Draco says nothing, his upper body sinking down against his thighs amid the wild grass he lets fence the garden. 

"It's not that I don't believe you, you know." Harry's voice grows softer still, and closer. "I understand we were married. I understand it was you who found me after everyone gave me up for dead, and I'm grateful." Draco sees two denim-clad knees as Harry kneels in front of him, but still he won't look up. "But even with everything I saw with Ron and Hermione's help—I just don't feel that way about you." A pause. "I don't hate you, Draco. I want to be friends." 

"Don't," Draco whispers. "That's not fair." 

"Maybe you're right." Harry sighs. "Maybe it isn't fair to you. It just doesn't seem fair to shut you out, either." 

"I would rather die," Draco says, straightening just enough to look Harry in the eye. "I would rather _die_ than be just your friend, Harry." 

Harry has the audacity to look insulted. "I'm trying to give you an olive branch, here!" 

"I don't fucking want it!" Draco shouts right back. "I don't want any fucking branches, I've got enough of them in the bloody _orchard_ I planted while I was waiting for my _husband_ to come back to me! That's what I want, Harry! _I want my husband back!"_

"I don't know what to tell you." Harry's green eyes are stormy with anger as he rises. "I'm trying to do what's kindest, because I've been reassured you deserve it, but maybe you don't." Harry turns to leave. 

The photo album. The memory of it comes back to Draco in a sudden rush, and he throws himself into a run to catch Harry by the elbow. "Wait, Harry—!" 

"What?" Harry stops, at least, though he pulls his elbow away. 

"I—" Draco has to say this clearly. "I made a photo album. So you could see." 

"A photo album?" Draco's heart soars at Harry's curious frown. 

"Yes! Hermione told me to make it, and I—" 

Harry sighs, cutting Draco off. "I don't want to see it." 

"Just look at it." Draco reaches for Harry's arm again. "Please, Harry." 

"I'm just—I'm not interested," Harry says, keeping his arm tight to his side. "Please don't ask me again." 

"So—" Draco finds himself blinking rapidly, his tears returning fresh and painful. "You would rather have gaping holes in your memory than even entertain the _notion_ of loving me?" 

He realizes, as Harry's own pained realization flashes across his face, that he hadn't even mentioned the word _love_ up to this point. 

"I'm sorry," Harry says, and he puts his hand on the door knob of the back door. "I'm going to go now." 

"Harry," Draco pleads, the name riding a hiccup. 

"There'll be a big dinner at the Burrow at the end of this week," Harry adds, looking the most contrite he has since arriving to Draco's garden. "Goodbye." 

And he leaves, the door clicking softly behind him. 

Draco lies back down in the lilies to sob, wishing all the more fervently for death.

⚘

The day of the dinner at the Burrow comes and goes like any other of Draco's days after Harry's visit.

He wakes, stays on the sofa until he wakes again, considers making tea, and doesn't wake for a third time until mid-afternoon. Then he sits up, casts his eyes listlessly over the latest edition of the Prophet without taking anything in for not quite an hour, and lies back down for another fitful bout of sleep. He retrieves a box of almond biscuits or rye crackers from the kitchen in the dead of night, and falls asleep in the process of eating it amid all the bedclothes that make his nest. 

The photo album on the kitchen table gleams in the moonlight, mocking Draco on his midnight snack runs. He does not touch it. 

Draco told Harry he would rather die than live a life without his marriage to Harry, but he doesn't have the courage to act on those words, even when he found Harry's ring on the kitchen table by the photo album after Harry left. He knows, too, that his garden is suffering, that the green living things outside don't deserve to languish the way he is, but it's another rainy summer in Britain; Draco convinces himself they don't need him after all, not now. 

He does, at least, stop crying quite so much after the first three days. 

What is he meant to do with his life now? There's no more widower support money coming from the Ministry anymore, now that Harry is alive and well and likely returning to work. The thought of working—of leaving the cottage, of being around other people, of trying to focus on _anything_ —is so overwhelming Draco can only force himself back to sleep in the face of it. 

He wonders if Harry will serve him divorce papers, now that his death certificate has been rescinded. One piece of parchment for another. 

The banging on his door, a week after the Burrow dinner he did not attend, seems to have several sources. When Draco listens—ah, yes. Ron, Hermione, Blaise, Pansy. Pansy and Blaise are shouting abuses about how Draco must be smelling up the cottage after staying inside it for so long, Ron joins in with them, and Hermione tries a more peaceful tack by shouting that they just want to know he's okay over the din of the other three. 

Draco doesn't answer, watching the door from the sofa with dull eyes. Harry had said Ron had told him to give the ring back. Probably the whole lot of them side with Harry, and Draco slides down further into his nest when he realizes he's pitting himself against Harry. And losing. 

He bets Pansy would tell him he's being melodramatic, a Victorian lady tossing herself from fainting couch to fainting couch. Blaise would say Draco isn't dressed well enough for the case of the vapors he so clearly has, which might be true, given Draco has been wearing Harry's ragged Kenmare Kestrels T-shirt every day since Harry's rejection. Hermione would very reasonably ask Draco to come out of the house because they're not going to throw him aside just because he's single again, but can't he respect Harry's feelings? And Ron—well, sod Ron and whatever he has to say. 

"I'll get it," Hermione's voice says, and Draco can _feel_ her powerful, methodical magic deconstructing his wards. 

He doesn't want to hear all the things he imagined they would say. Draco fishes his wand out from between the cushions of the sofa and rebuilds his wards wherever Hermione has taken pieces of them down, leaving her with a regenerating puzzle. 

Hermione curses, and shouts, "Stop that, Draco!" to no avail. Draco continues to fill in the gaps she's created, without responding to a word she's said. 

Ron's deep voice murmurs something unintelligible; Hermione sighs, deep and exasperated, and then suddenly there is no more of Hermione's assault on the cottage wards. Then there are no more of Draco's friends, or perhaps ex-friends, lurking at the front door. 

There might have been more knocking on his door at some point. Draco might have also dreamed it. There's little difference, these days, between Draco's wakeful hours and his time spent asleep; a fugue state that renders time meaningless. Draco does, at least, have enough of himself left to scoff at the pathetic mess he's become, dehydrated and listless while burrowed into a sweaty duvet and a ragged shirt that has lost all of its Harry scent. 

He could Obliviate himself. 

The thought comes to Draco during one of his many self-flagellations for his inability to follow through and die, just as he'd told Harry he'd rather do. Yes, Draco could Obliviate himself; he could be like Harry had been all this time, possessed of no more than his childhood memories, relieved of the pain of losing his husband over and over again. Free of his broken heart. Draco finds his wand where it's rolled under the sofa, runs his fingers up and down the polished ruddy wood. 

It's such a simple incantation. A single word that robbed Harry of years of his life; the Mediwizards at St. Mungos admitted Harry would likely never remember who cursed him, even with a full Legilimency healing. And yes, Draco believes he's powerful enough to pull off a memory charm of the magnitude and precision required. He could Obliviate himself. 

The problem is that Draco as he is now absolutely hates Draco as he was, before he met Harry all over again. Before Harry, before Ron and Hermione accepting him as well, before regular dinners at the Burrow. Molly Weasley giving Draco a bone-crushing hug of induction into the family was transformative. Without them, Draco would have never grown to be the man he's become, worthy of the love of good people. 

Draco closes his eyes, thinking of that hug from Molly. He thinks of Ron and Hermione standing in his wedding—no. He thinks of Hermione, wary and tired, holding months-old baby Hugo out to him. He thinks of the warm, fragile weight of Hugo in his hands, Ron's held breath as Draco cradles Hugo to his chest and falls in love with the sensation. That had been the moment when they'd first started to let him in. 

" _Expecto Patronum,_ " Draco breathes. 

His wand glows silver, but nothing escapes it. 

" _Expecto Patronum,_ " Draco says again, shakily. 

Harry had been in the room when Draco had first held Hugo. He hadn't fallen in love with holding an infant all by himself; no, Harry had been next to him, arm held around Draco's waist to anchor him in the sea of Ron and Hermione's doubt. Harry had been there when Molly had embraced him. Harry had never missed a Burrow gathering. Whatever happy moment Draco tries to summon, that he might send a message to his friends that he's sorry, that he doesn't want to push them away anymore, Harry is always there, infecting the memory with pain and sadness. 

Draco puts down his wand. He goes back to sleep to escape the awfulness of being conscious, and even when he wakes, he ignores the pangs of hunger urging him to get up, the dry mouth begging to be quenched. It's only the threat of pissing himself that gets him out of his nest when his bladder gets insistent enough. 

It only hurts for a moment when he collapses to the floor on the way back to the sofa.

⚘

When Draco comes to, it takes him a moment to realize he's not curled into the rank duvet on the sofa. No, he's laid out flat on his back, musty bedclothes that haven't been aired in weeks pulled up to his chest. Musty, but clean.

He's upstairs. 

It's that realization that pushes him the rest of the way awake, because he has no memory of climbing the stairs, much less into his marriage bed. The bedroom is full of light from curtains that have been pulled back, there are murmuring voices coming from downstairs, and most alarmingly of all, Harry is sitting in the far corner, on the chair where he used to pile his clean laundry rather than fold it in a timely manner. 

Draco struggles to sit upright, feeling as though his energy's been drained away. "What's happened?" he wants to know. "What are you doing here?" 

"It's my house, I've been told," Harry says delicately, to his hands clasped in his lap. 

Draco wants to tell Harry to get out. He wants to tell Harry it'll always be his house. He says nothing. 

"Hermione is downstairs, with Pansy," Harry continues. "She, er, set up an alarm in your wards, she said. When she was trying to take them down." 

"Clever as always," Draco mutters, letting himself fall back against the pillows. "So I have a bit of a stumble in my own home and that gives my friends the right to break in with my ex-husband, does it?" 

Harry frowns. "You're not well, Malfoy." He clears his throat. "Draco." 

"Piss off. I'm fine, or I _was_ before I had to look at you first thing in the bloody morning." Draco throws back the covers to find he's at least still dressed in his disgusting T-shirt, with nothing to cover his arse but a pair of briefs. He apparently hasn't got any dignity left anyway, so he plants his feet on the floor and makes an attempt to stand. He falls right back onto the mattress, his legs infuriatingly shaky. 

"Hermione says you're dehydrated and need to eat." Harry points at the nightstand, where Draco now sees there's a glass of water and a lopsided sandwich that looks like Harry made it. 

"Why doesn't Hermione come tell me that herself, then? Since it sounds like she's in my house and all." Draco slaps one of his thighs for having the audacity to not let him escape this room. "Go and get her, and then don't come back, how about that?" 

"Draco." 

"I want to _die_ when I look at you," Draco snaps, "only I thought about the follow through on that for the past—however long it's been, I don't know, who cares—and I couldn't do it, so I suppose the truth is I want to cry for ages and wear your horrid Quidditch shirts when I look at you." He glances at Harry, who looks properly stricken, at least. "And look! I haven't got any tears in my head at the moment, but give me a bit with this," at which Draco holds up the glass of water, "and I'll have some ready. Cheers, Potter!" He takes a big, dramatic gulp of the flat, room-temperature water and sticks his tongue out. 

"Draco." Harry says it a little louder this time. 

" _What?"_ Draco twists to look at Harry full-on, and nearly falls over. 

Harry holds up the photo album, big and green and heavy. Draco doesn't know how he missed it. "I thought—you might show me this." 

Draco stares at the album, his breath caught. "You've got it right there. What do you need me for?" 

Harry purses his lips, glancing away as he sets the album down on his lap. "When you found me on that island, the only memories I had of you were terrible. You were not a good person when we were children." 

"I know," Draco agrees, sober and quiet. 

"And—even after everything Ron and Hermione showed me in our sessions, the vast majority of my memories of you continued to be those awful ones. Weighing all of those against being _told_ we're married—it just didn't add up for me." 

"Stop," Draco says, holding up a hand as he turns back to face the nightstand. "Just—stop." 

"I just want you to understand." Harry's chair creaks, and then so do the floorboards as Harry crosses the room. The mattress dips beside Draco as Harry sits next to him, still holding the photo album, and Draco leans away. There's that feeling of wanting to die, again, or at least wanting to cease existing. Harry's so close, and he still remembers so vividly what it was to bury himself in Harry's arms, pillow himself against Harry's chest. 

"I wish you would leave me alone," Draco says, closing his burning eyes. He's still too dehydrated to cry properly, but it doesn't mean his body won't try. "This is—this is torture, Harry, please—" 

Harry takes one of Draco's hands, his fingers terrible brands against Draco's skin, and puts it on the cover of the album. "I just didn't realize, before now," Harry says, so soft it's almost a whisper, "how serious this is for you, and I should have." 

Draco's eyes focus, at last, as he looks out the window. "My garden is dying," he whimpers. 

"It's been a few weeks," Harry says, "since my last visit. Draco, look at me." And though it hurts to tear his eyes away from the wasteland that is his garden, Draco obeys. 

"I'm not saying that my feelings have changed, necessarily," Harry says, with arched eyebrows and a slow, careful cadence. "I just also realize how important this is for you, and—it's only fair to give you a chance. To show me what we had." He nods at the album. "Please?" 

Draco hesitates, but only once. He opens the photo album to spread it across both their laps.


	2. Chapter 2

It's the first week of Harry's holiday in Connemara, and he's signed up for a tour that he's hoping will give him some basic landmarks for exploring on his own later, the better to not get hopelessly lost in the wilderness. A tour run by Muggles, specifically, so he doesn't understand what's happening when Draco Malfoy—of all bloody people—shows up as part of the tour group. 

Harry tells himself he's 25 now, there's no need to confront or even acknowledge Malfoy's presence. He's a grown man, perfectly capable of not having his holiday ruined by former junior league Death Eaters who publicly claim to have reformed. He's definitely above noting that Malfoy's hairline is already receding like his imprisoned father's, or that Malfoy seems to have already acquired a sunburn. What a stupid git. 

Malfoy definitely notices Harry, and his mouth tightens into a typical sneer, but he doesn't approach Harry, either. In fact, he falls to the back of the group—alone, Harry realizes, as companionless as Harry is out here. Harry came alone because he wanted to, with his friends' blessing, but he bets Malfoy doesn't have friends anymore. 

Harry gives himself another reminder that he's too old for such pettiness, and that it doesn't matter what Malfoy's life is, anyway, and takes himself to the front of the tour group. 

In contrast to the Muggle-run tour Harry began his holiday with, a small group of elderly witches run the lodgings where Harry's chosen to stay during his time away from society. It's just easier to be able to use magic at the end of the day, and they don't seem terribly impressed with him for being Harry Potter, which he loves. The lodgings in question are a loose cluster of little houses, just big enough for one person to sleep, bathe, eat, and not much else. 

He should have expected Malfoy would be here, too, though the idea of Draco "My father will hear about this" Malfoy deigning to stay in a structure probably no bigger than his wardrobe at Malfoy Manor is mind-boggling. 

When he sees Malfoy at the pub central to the houses one night, he reminds himself yet again that he's here to enjoy himself and the natural beauty of Ireland, _not_ get into fights with bigoted old schoolmates. Then he has a couple more pints, and he can't remember what he'd been reminding himself. 

"Alright, Malfoy, what's your game?" Harry demands as he storms up to Malfoy on the other end of the bar. 

"I could ask you the same," Malfoy retorts, puffing out his chicken chest as he puts his haughty nose in the air. "Obsessed much, Potter? It's been nearly a decade since school, you know. Pathetic." 

"You're the one following me!" Harry splutters. "I came here for a peaceful getaway, and here you are, showing up everywhere I go!" 

"Oh, kiss my arse! Saint Potter needs his sanctum, does he?" Malfoy sneers. 

"Your arse is so narrow there's nothing _to_ kiss, Malfoy, how's that?" Harry says with a nasty laugh. "You don't look any different from when we were sixteen and you were the world's worst murderer!" 

Malfoy's pale face colors satisfyingly, just as the barkeep puts a hand on Harry's shoulder. "I'll be asking you back to your seat, mate," the barkeep says, as gently as her grip on Harry is strong. 

"He started it," Harry says, pointing a wavering finger in Malfoy's direction. "The git's been following me." 

"I'm just another vacationer enjoying the sights, and this man accosted me," Malfoy says with a particularly smarmy look on his face. "I don't know him." 

"Unlucky for you, I've got ears," the barkeep says, giving Malfoy a disappointed look. "I've also got free rein and not much patience for nonsense, so now you're both out for the night." 

"What?!" Malfoy gasps, but the barkeep is already ushering him out along with Harry. 

"You're welcome back tomorrow night," the barkeep says as she hustles both men out the door. "Goodnight, gentlemen." 

For a moment, both Harry and Malfoy just stand in the cold night air in shocked silence, staring at each other. 

"You're ruining my holiday!" Harry cries. 

"You're ruining your own holiday!" Malfoy cries right back, stamping his foot. "You could have been a grownup about it, you could have left well alone, but no! Harry Potter, stupid drunkard, just _had_ to fuck up everybody's night because he can't stand a bit of discomfort!" 

"I've earned my right to comfort!" Harry practically stabs himself in the chest with his own pointing finger. "And you—why are you even here? Isn't this well below your stupid Pureblood standards?" 

"Fuck you, Potter!" Malfoy gives Harry a decent shove, and in his inebriated state, Harry actually does stagger back several paces. Malfoy's problem is that he's not in Harry's weight class, and when Harry comes barreling back to give him a push in return, Malfoy is bowled over onto his skinny arse. 

The pub door opens. "I said get gone, the both of you!" the barkeep shouts. "You're both pretty, now back to your bloody cottages and go sleep it off!" The door slams shut again. 

"Fine!" Harry barks at the closed door. He looks down at Malfoy. "You'd better stay away from me," he warns. "I'm here for three bloody months, and you're not going to ruin it for me." And he leaves before Malfoy can say anything back.

⚘

Shockingly, Harry's warning seems to work. He doesn't know if Malfoy is actively trying to avoid him, or if serendipity is just working in his favor as he explores the wilderness. He does a lot of hiking, seeing how far he can push himself without the aid of magic or other people, seeing how much he can see in one day. He also does a lot of lying about in grass, letting the loud quiet of the forest—full of buzzing insects, shrieking birdcalls, chittering rodents, and creaking boughs blowing in a wind coming off the loughs that dot the land around Connemara. 

It's a kind of loneliness he's never felt, and he thinks he likes it. It's nothing like the social isolation he felt growing up with the Dursleys, never being able to escape their presence and never being included. He can go for miles without seeing another human being, much less one that will recognize him, that will unload their wartime tragedies on him as if he's a roving pastor. Sometimes he packs a bedroll and provisions and camps out in the grasslands, lulled to sleep by the moon. 

Oh, certainly he misses Ron and Hermione, the whole Weasley clan, Neville and the other Gryffindors; all his brave friends who helped win the war. But here, he feels—free. Of everything. 

Three weeks into his holiday, though, he runs into Malfoy again, and this time he can't blame Malfoy. 

Harry is feeling the unusual heat of the day, and while it would be easy to take a cold rinse back at his cottage and get on with his day, he knows he'll just get sweaty again. He may as well enjoy the act of cooling off, and does his best to follow a big paper map to a hidden pond. The map itself is wizard-made, because by Muggle maps there are no bodies of water inside Connemara National Park, but local magical folk thought a bit of water might spruce the place up a bit. A pond only locatable, much like most wizarding places, by a wixen with intent, is advertised as a feature of a stay in Connemara Cottages. 

When he finds the pond, he's relieved enough to immediately strip his shirt off. It's as he gets the collar over his hair that he realizes, with dawning horror, that Malfoy is already in the water, staring at Harry like a mouse spotted by an owl. Harry pulls his shirt off his arms slowly, never taking his eyes off Malfoy treading water. 

Then Malfoy breaks the moment by sneering. "Going to tell me to get out of _your_ pond, Potter?" he asks, bobbing up in the water. 

"Would you go if I did?" Harry asks, snorting as he grips his shirt in one hand. 

"No." Malfoy leans back, kicking in the water to propel himself away from Harry. 

"Then no." Harry shrugs. "But I'm not going away either." And he starts unlacing his hiking boots. 

"Entitled as ever, I see." 

"That's rich, coming from Little Lord Fauntleroy himself," Harry says as he toes off his boots and starts unbuttoning his jeans. 

"Lord Fauntleroy was an innocent and pure child presiding over his tenants with kindness and a just hand, and I bet you didn't know that." Malfoy's long pale limbs splashing about as he swims a tight circle make him look like a drowning spider, in Harry's opinion. "You didn't, did you?" 

"I can't imagine anyone but you would give a damn, frankly." Harry shucks his Levis off, making a pile of clothes on top of his boots that he finishes off by pulling his socks off by the toes. "I'll bet you only looked it up because you felt stupid every time someone called you that." 

"I just like to enrich myself, even when the enrichment is foul Muggle stories that are apparently misremembered by the general Muggle public." Malfoy dips his head beneath the water's surface, and comes up with his hair dark and plastered to his high, rounded forehead that constitutes so much of his face's real estate. Harry snorts at his own observation. 

"See you haven't changed since we were children, then." Harry wades in up to his waist, the initial iciness of the pond a salve to his overheated skin. "Still a pathetic bigot." Malfoy glowers from ten feet away, blowing aggravated bubbles across the surface. 

"I didn't say the story was foul for being Muggle. It is foul, and it was made by Muggles. Two separate facts that describe the story." 

"Oh, well then!" Harry scoffs. "What a moment of growth for you. You hate Little Lord Fauntleroy on its own merits, and not just because its creator didn't own a wand. I'll mark you down as 'reformed' on the list of evil gits responsible for the suffering of others, shall I?" 

Suddenly Malfoy is zooming through the water for the shoreline, and his long, narrow body rises from the pond like an underfed Godzilla, water streaming from broad, bony shoulders. "I should have known you'd figure out how to drive me off no matter what you said," Malfoy snarls, marching for his own pile of clothing. He keeps his back to Harry, which Harry is quite alright with—if the way Malfoy's underwear clings sheerly to his buttocks is any indictation, Harry would get an eye-searing show if Malfoy turned around at all. Malfoy stomps into his trousers, making the seat of them wet instantly, but he doesn't seem to care as he rounds on Harry. 

"And for that matter—maybe I am reformed! Or maybe I want to be! But you—you, Saint Potter! You'll never let me, will you?" 

"Has it occurred to you that I don't _care_ if you want to be reformed?" Harry bites back. "You can think of yourself as a better person all you like, it doesn't wash away the harm you've done!" Harry spreads one arm wide as he says _wash_ , making a little wave in the water. 

Malfoy glares at Harry, chest heaving. "So what am I supposed to do? Repent all my life, knowing I'll never be forgiven for something I did when I was a boy?" 

"Whatever you like," Harry says coolly, walking backward into the pond until he's in up to his shoulders. "You haven't ever actually said you're sorry, though." 

For a moment, Malfoy makes as if to leave the pond's shore entirely, holding his impractical-looking shoes in one hand, shirt and socks in the other. Then he stops, the leg not holding his weight bouncing anxiously in place. 

"I am sorry," Malfoy says, though it's not soft, not contrite. It's also not whiny, as it might have been when they were younger. He hesitates, mouth open to say more, and then his lips seal shut and he heads off into the tree line after all. 

Harry resolves to put the whole incident out of his mind, from Malfoy's unnerving candidness, to the sight of Malfoy's nearly-naked body, and enjoy his swim. 

After all, he's here to escape the war.

⚘

A week later, Harry finds Malfoy stranded on a mountainside. 

Well, stranded is a big word for it. Malfoy is in the process of casting healing charms on his sprained ankle when Harry comes across him, muttering indignant incantations as he runs his wand tip over the swollen joint. His sock and trouser leg are both ripped, and yet again, Malfoy has worn the wrong shoes for being out and about in the wilderness. His elegant black boots with smooth leather soles look like a posh person's aesthetic idea of mountainwear, which Harry supposes is exactly what they are when worn by Malfoy. 

Malfoy spots him at ten paces and scowls. "If you're going to tell me to shove off, you're going to have to wait," he says, pausing his spellwork. "Or, conversely, you could be an adult and keep moving." 

Harry's curiosity supersedes his annoyance. "What did you do?" he asks, approaching Malfoy to get a better look at the ankle. 

"Sprained my ankle, what's it look like?" There's not much bite to Malfoy's words, though, as focused as he is on his healing charms. "This sodding mountain hasn't got any firm footing. You'd think there'd be a path." 

"A path wouldn't be any fun," Harry snorts as he comes to a halt next to Malfoy. "It's those boots, you know, not the mountain. You look like you're going shopping in London, not going for a hike." 

Malfoy eyes Harry's rugged boots with distaste. "As if you'd catch me in those vile things you call boots." 

"Well," Harry says with a shrug, "I've been hiking without issue for weeks and you've got a sprained ankle the one time I see you on a mountainside, so who made the right decision here?" 

"Me, because I don't look like a styleless lummox," Malfoy says, without a second thought. "And I'm a wizard who knows healing charms, so there." 

"You don't seem to be a wizard who knows how to do them well," Harry laughs. "Having a bit of trouble there, Malfoy?" 

"No," Malfoy snaps, despite the obvious truth. "On your broom, Potter, you're ruining my concentration." 

"One side," Harry says as he kneels beside Malfoy's ankle, pulling his wand from inside his windbreaker. 

"I said I've got it!" Malfoy protests, but Harry's already batting his hand aside. "Saint Potter strikes again! Got to show me up with a bit of do-goodery, have you?" 

"Oh, shut up," Harry says, absently as he gives a quick review of healing spells he knows. His field training with the Aurors has given him plenty of options, and within moments, a wordless tap of his wand has Malfoy's ankle set to rights. 

"Did you help me because you wanted me to leave faster, or because you wanted to remind me you're a better person than me?" Malfoy asks, giving his foot an experimental wiggle. 

"Well, I did it because I knew I could help and you weren't doing too well, but clearly I made a mistake," Harry says, rolling his eyes as he gets to his feet. "Most people say thanks when they're given help, you know." 

"Help that wasn't asked for," Malfoy sniffs. "I could have done it eventually." 

"No, you couldn't have. It wasn't the right spell you were trying to use. You were trying to mend a broken bone that you didn't have." Harry shades a flat hand over his brow, scanning the way ahead. 

"Oh." Malfoy sounds thoroughly annoyed, but when Harry glances at him, all he sees is embarrassment. "Well, you don't know, maybe I would have realized that and tried a different spell." 

"You're welcome, you blathering prick," Harry sighs. "Think you can get off the mountain without breaking your delicate neck so I can carry on?" 

"I certainly don't need your escort, if that's what you're asking." Malfoy pushes himself upright with a bit of a struggle, his dressy boots sliding about in the dirt just as Harry thought they might. "I've been here for a good month without needing anyone's help, least of all yours." 

"You know what, Malfoy? You're so right. Throw yourself off the nearest cliff for all I care." Harry rolls his eyes again, and sets off for the peak again. 

"Fine. Maybe I will. Hope you like having my beautiful corpse on your conscience, Potter," Malfoy says behind Harry, amid the sounds of his chic shoes scraping against rocks. "It'd serve you right—augh!" 

Harry looks over his shoulder just in time to see Malfoy lose his footing and land right on his arse on a particularly pointy bit of ground. "I told you those boots were no good," he laughs, turning the rest of his body around so he can really get a good chuckle in. 

"Oh, no, please," Malfoy says, flapping his hands like distressed birds around his face. "By all means, Potter, laugh at me in my death throes. How very heroic of you." 

"Death throes. You big ninny." Harry makes his way down to Malfoy, holding his hand out with no consideration for Malfoy's previous raving about not wanting unasked-for help. "Come on then." 

"You can't call me a ninny at the same time you're offering to help me up," Malfoy snaps. 

"I'm the savior of the wizarding world, or something," Harry says, giving his hand a single shake to reiterate his offer of help to Malfoy. "Maybe you've heard it means I can do whatever I want? That's what I hear, anyway." 

"Oh, you love it," Malfoy says, crossing his arms and sneering. "Everyone's so far up your arse they're crawling up into your head. That's why it's so big. It's a wonder you can keep it upright." 

"Stop being a pillock and take my hand or I'll break both your legs and leave you on this mountain to practice that broken bones spell you were using incorrectly before." Harry shakes his hand once more. "Come on, Malfoy, you great lump." 

"Fine. But only because you're being violent and I'm afraid for my life." Malfoy finally accepts Harry's hand, and Harry takes at least a little pleasure in yanking him up so suddenly that Malfoy stumbles a few paces. "Potter! Be careful, you idiot!" 

"Idiot, am I?" Harry says, and he lets go right when Malfoy's balance is at its worst. "Whoops! Clumsy idiot, that's me." Malfoy shrieks, and Harry catches him by the front of his tailored button-down shirt at the last second before he tumbles end over end down the incline. 

"You did that on purpose," Malfoy seethes. 

"That's what they never bring up in the biographies," Harry says with a smirk, letting Malfoy find his footing at last. "I'm a real sadist." 

"Ha!" Malfoy barks. "You, a sadist? You don't know the first thing." 

"What, doubting my sexual prowess?" Harry says, laughing again. He doesn't know what makes him say it, except that the way Malfoy turns absolutely flaming was worth it. He _knew_ Malfoy had to be a prude. 

"I don't think you have any, actually! Too busy saving the world to get it up," Malfoy retorts. "Everyone in that bloody school thought you were some kind of sex god Adonis after that sham of a Triwizard Tournament, but I always knew better." 

"What?" This time Harry's laugh comes out strangled and nervous. "No they didn't."

"Oh, yes they did, and it was sickening! Bad enough, everyone simpering about how famous you were, how powerful you must be, then you had the nerve to hit _puberty_ where we could all see, _and_ be an athlete! How absolutely disgusting of you!" Malfoy slips a bit as he jabs his finger in Harry's direction, but he doesn't seem to notice, too caught up in his own strange little tantrum. 

Harry wants to say something flip about how Cho might have given him the time of day sooner if that were the case—but thinking about Cho, and the way she cried as she kissed him in fifth year, brings up thoughts of Cedric, and Cedric's dead body, and suddenly Harry is somber. 

That doesn't seem to be the reaction Malfoy wanted, because he's frowning, and says, "Oh, come off it, Potter, that didn't hurt your feelings. There's no way." 

"It's not that," Harry murmurs, trying to refocus his eyes. He's here to escape the war. He pinches the bridge of his nose, dislodging his glasses as he screws his eyes shut to chase away visions of Cedric, alive or dead. He sighs. "Listen, Malfoy, do you need help getting down the mountain? Frankly, I don't even know how you got up this far." 

Malfoy stiffens. "I—" Then he looks down at his shoes, at the way his legs are straining to keep him standing and steady. "I could transfigure my shoes," he says with a sniff, and does just that with a quick snap of his wand, his boots growing modest treads without changing their sleek shape. 

"Why on earth didn't you do that to begin with?" 

"I don't know, I just assumed my climbing technique was off," Malfoy says with a shrug, before catching himself, perhaps angry at himself for being so casual with Harry. 

"Well then, I suppose you've helped yourself," Harry says, and starts turning back toward the summit. 

"Wait," Malfoy says, and Harry is taken off guard by the uncertainty that suddenly laces his voice. When Harry pauses silently, Malfoy clears his throat. "I don't remember the way down." 

"Well, generally speaking, you let gravity help you figure that one out," Harry says with arched brows. 

"Right, back to what you said about throwing myself off the nearest cliff, is it?" 

"No, I—oh, alright, what is it you want? A guide?" Harry holds out his hand in exasperated supplication. 

"If you would be so gracious," Malfoy drawls. 

"Fine." Harry gives the direction of the summit one last wistful glance, promising himself to come back and try again _sans_ Malfoy, and starts making his way down. "Come on, then. Keep up." 

The walk back down is not nearly as exciting. Malfoy wants the safest, most boring paths through the woods, lest he dirty up his expensive outfit or have to exert more energy than a stroll down Diagon Alley. "I don't get it," Harry says, a third of the way down. "What are you doing out here?" 

"Well, right now, I'm trapped on this rude little hill with a man who has threatened my physical safety on more than one occasion," Malfoy says as he very preciously hops over a log so small it barely deserves the title. "Why, what were _you_ doing?" 

"Git," Harry sighs. "I meant here, in Connemara, in all this," Harry waves at the trees around them, "nature. You're completely unprepared and totally out of your element. Oughn't you be in your palace, being waited on hand and foot and pretending to camp out fifty meters from your front door?" 

"It's a manor, not a palace, you plebeian." Malfoy wobbles dramatically, and he yelps as he grabs ahold of the strong arm Harry holds out. Once he's stable he glowers at Harry, ripping his hand away as though the help has offended him. "Why, am I not allowed to want to get away from England for a bit?" 

"I don't think you're having a lick of fun, is the thing," Harry says, taking a big step down off a boulder wedged halfway into the earth. "You could be on a yacht." 

"I hardly know what that is. A boat? I can't imagine why I'd want to spend my holiday stuck on a boat. Really, Potter." Malfoy eyes the distance between the top of the boulder and the ground below it. 

"Can you really not make the jump? You were a Seeker in school, for Merlin's sake." 

"Hopping about in the dirt is not the same as being a young athlete." Malfoy jumps down in one smooth motion, but doesn't stick the landing, and has to grab onto Harry again. "I just needed to get away from—everything. Isn't that what you're doing?" 

"What everything do you need to get away from?" Harry chuckles, waiting for Malfoy's spidery grip to leave him. "All your piles of gold? Your wardrobe full of posh clothes? Convenience? Not falling on your arse? Stop me if I actually say something you wouldn't miss." 

Malfoy frowns, looking out into the trees as he crosses his arms and drums his fingers on his bicep. "What did you want to get away from, Potter?" 

Harry could say he never said he wanted to get away from anything, but truthfully, he doesn't remember if that's the case—and it's the truth. "The war," Harry says. 

"There you have it, then." 

Cold sweeps over Harry. "You can't just say that. It's not the same for you." 

"No." Malfoy still won't look at Harry. "No, I suppose it's not, but that's true of anybody, isn't it? And yet somehow, telling myself that the great Harry Potter had it worse does not make it any easier to bear." 

For a moment, Harry is prepared to tell Malfoy that anything he has to bear is still better than he deserves. Beyond the war, Malfoy has just never been a good person—cruel, petty, cowardly, delighting in the suffering of others. 

"What am I supposed to do with myself?" Malfoy asks, more of the sky than of Harry. "I can't—go anywhere, or do anything, without my stupid, brainwashed choices—or my father's stupid, murderous ones—following me about like a hungry dog." 

"What do you mean, can't go anywhere? You're right here." 

"Here, in the wilderness, being reminded of those exact stupid, brainwashed choices, yes," Malfoy agrees. 

"It's not like you committed some social faux pas, Malfoy. You were a war criminal." 

"I was cleared!" Malfoy suddenly whirls, and Harry is startled—and embarrassed, somehow—to see tears in Malfoy's furious eyes, his face a deep pink. "With _your_ help, no less, because it was _you_ who argued that I had been a child, without blood on my hands, manipulated by evil forces far more powerful than I!" 

Harry stands, silent and stunned, listening to Malfoy's wracked breathing. Malfoy isn't lying—he _had_ spoken at Malfoy's trials. 

"It didn't seem fair to treat you as equal to your father," Harry says at last. "Because you were a child. But it doesn't change that the rest of us were children, too, subject to your bigotry for years." 

"You don't need to call me a war criminal, then, to tell me I was a bad person. Am a bad person," Malfoy says, putting one hand over half his face, his thumb wiping at his eye. "I just thought maybe, out here, I might find who else I could be besides a bad person." 

"Well." Harry clears his throat. "You might have been a person more prepared for the outdoors." 

Malfoy stares at him, hand coming away from his face. 

"Sorry," Harry says, biting his lip. "Poor taste." 

"Story of your life," Malfoy mutters, but they finally resume their downward journey. 

After another twenty minutes of saying nothing, Malfoy says, "So where are your blessed friends, anyway, Potter? I thought the Golden Trio were inseparable." 

"The Golden what?" Harry snorts. "They're back in England, working. Just as I was, before I took a three month holiday to just be alone for a bit." 

"Oh." Malfoy hasn't got anything to say to that, it seems, and conversation dies again, until he says, "I always thought you hated to be alone. Every single time I saw you at school you were always surrounded by people." 

Harry chews his lower lip. "It's not the same when you choose to be alone. It's—respite, especially when you know everyone you love, and who loves you back, will be there when you're ready to return." 

"Is that what that feels like?" Malfoy murmurs, getting ahead of Harry. Predictably, he makes a wrong step and falls, yet again, skidding down the mountain on his bottom. "These new soles do nothing!" 

"You put the barest approximation of treads on your boots," Harry says as he grips Malfoy by the forearm and pulls him up. "Of course they've got no grip." 

"Oh, listen to you, you great big outdoorsman," Malfoy grouses, rolling his eyes, but he's at least stopped harping on not wanting Harry's help. 

"You know," Malfoy says as they approach the foot of the mountain at last, "I do mean it when I say I want to be better. I'm just not sure where to begin." 

Harry stops, one hand on his hips. "Are you sorry?" 

"I told you, at the pond—" 

"Are you sorry for calling Hermione a Mudblood? Are you sorry for tormenting Ron for not having as much money as you? Are you sorry for slandering me? For attacking me? For leaving me injured, immobilized and invisible on a train with no one on it?" 

Malfoy blanches, which is a feat. "Yes," he grits out. 

"Then say it." 

"You've already said it." 

"Say it, Malfoy!" 

Malfoy huffs, rubbing at his arms. "I am sorry. Sorry for calling Granger—that word." He glances at Harry, and when he gets back nothing, he continues, "For getting on Weasley for being poor." 

"Keep going." 

"I'm sorry for that business with that horrible Skeeter woman." Suddenly Malfoy stands taller. "But you and I, we're even when it comes to attacks." 

"What do you—?" 

Even as the half-formed question leaves Harry's lips, even as Malfoy begins to unbutton his shirt, he knows. How could he forget? Malfoy yanks open the collar of his shirt down to his sternum, revealing silvery, keloided scars criss-crossing his chest, with plenty more hidden beneath the closed buttons. "I'd say bleeding out on a bathroom floor is about equal to a broken Savior's nose, wouldn't you?" 

A younger Harry might have asserted Malfoy got what he deserved, then, but Harry as a man knows there's nothing that could make his reckless attack on Malfoy right. "Then I'm sorry, Malfoy. I should have never used that curse on you. I didn't know what it did, but—that doesn't make it alright." 

Malfoy rebuttons his shirt with fastidious fingers. "Then yes, Potter, I'm sorry for what I did to you. One sorry for another." 

"There, see?" Harry steps out onto even ground, inviting Malfoy to do the same with a wave of his arm. "Now you've begun." 

"I—what, so the path to redemption is just to apologize to you for everything I've done?" Malfoy joins him without so much as a sigh of relief, so caught up in his indignation. 

"Well, sure. If anyone's to exonerate you to the rest of the world, wouldn't it be me?" 

Malfoy stews visibly, but says absolutely nothing because he and Harry both know Harry's right. 

"Next time you see me, you can apologize some more," Harry says. "Can you find your way back from here?" 

"You know, I think I'll see you at the pub tonight," Malfoy replies. He takes a step back, smirking as he clasps his hands behind his back. "Au revoir, Potter." With that, and a resounding crack of displaced air, Malfoy is gone. 

"That blighter," Harry fumes, because of _course_ Malfoy could have Disapparated all along, but Harry had been so reliant on walking everywhere these past weeks he'd practically forgotten it was an option. Malfoy had never needed his help getting off the mountain; he'd probably just wanted to derail Harry's day, and Harry had fallen for it. 

He turns around, and sets off for the mountain again. He _will_ reach the summit. 

The pub is open late into the night, which is all very good for Harry because he's starving when he finally returns from his second attempt at scaling the mountain. By the time he reached the peak it was too dark to much appreciate the view, and he took a page out of Malfoy's stupid book to Apparate to the foot, the better to grumble about how Malfoy must have been planning to ruin his day. 

After ten at night, the kitchen is only serving one thing: Stew. When Harry asks what's in it, the barkeep gives him a hard eye and repeats that he can have stew or nothing. "Stew it is," Harry sighs, and the barkeep whisks off to spoon him up a bowl. "And a pint!" he calls after her, but he's not sure she heard him. "Not the lager!" 

"You're late, Potter." Malfoy practically leaps onto the stool beside Harry's. "I've thought of at least five apologies while I waited for you, and then I took one back because you made me wait so long." 

"You're the one who said you'd be at the pub and then vanished," Harry says, gruffly. "What you do with your time has got nothing to do with me." 

"Oh, don't be that way, Potty," Malfoy says, leering as he props his chin on his steepled hands. "I'm enrolled in the Harry Saint Potter reform school of not being an evil git anymore, as of earlier today, remember?" 

"You might not be evil as a grown man, but you'll never stop being a git." The barkeep delivers Harry's stew with an unceremonious thunk, and eyes both Harry and Malfoy. 

"I'm watching you two," she says. The glass she puts next to Harry's stew is absolutely full of the lager he said he didn't want. 

"I'm reformed," Malfoy says, holding his hands up. "I promise." 

"Not yet you aren't," Harry says, pulling the stew closer. It's a little on the grey side. The lager he ignores. 

"I'm sorry for the time I dressed up like a Dementor with Vince and Greg and tried to scare you on the Quidditch pitch," Malfoy says, ticking it off on one finger as Harry takes his first spoonful of the stew. It's passable. 

"I'm not sorry for hitting you with a Patronus for trying it," Harry says, dunking his spoon back down. He doesn't even have to blow on the stew because it's not hot enough. 

Malfoy rolls his eyes, and he points a second finger, tapping it with his other hand. "I'm sorry for trying to get Hagrid sacked." 

"And trying to get Buckbeack killed?" 

"Buck—that great hairy beast?" Malfoy scoffs, and when Harry gives him a stony face right back, Malfoy frowns. "That was my father's idea. Not mine. But," and he swallows, "yes, I can be sorry on his behalf." 

"Keep going. I've got plenty of lukewarm stew to get through." 

"Keep going, he says," Malfoy mutters. "Alright, fine. I'm sorry for working for that troll in a pink skirt in fifth year." 

"Umbridge? I always thought she looked more like a toad," Harry says, tapping the part in his unruly hair. "That fussy little bow was like a fly she was about to eat." 

"You know, you're right, and I'm a fool for never having realized it." The barkeep comes back, and Malfoy orders a glass of wine. "Who knew you were such a visionary, Potter?" 

"If the opposite of you constantly insulting me is being some kind of sycophant, I'd rather you go back to insulting me." 

"Sycophant? Never. I could insult you at a moment's notice, Potter, I've got a list as long as my arm of all your transgressions against style and good graces." 

"Now apologize for that." 

"No, I'm apologizing for things I did as a child. And also, I'm right, you've got no style or grace." The wine glass is delivered with about as much care as Harry's stew, and Draco grimaces at it. "Oh, what is this? An American Merlot?"

Harry laughs. It's strange to realize that what he has with Malfoy isn't arguing, it's banter. This is Malfoy being friendly. Harry wonders if Malfoy wasting his time today was less a devious plan and more Malfoy not knowing how else to spend time with another human being. 

"What else have you got, then?" Harry asks, trying to find at least one decent piece of meat in his stew. 

"A headache, from how terrible this wine is," Malfoy says, sticking his tongue out. 

"Malfoy." 

Putting the wine down, Malfoy leans forward on the bar, sighing. "Sixth year. All of it. The whole ugly thing, from end to end." 

Suddenly this game is no fun, and Harry is reminded it never should have been. He doesn't want to think about the war. He doesn't want to think about death. He just wanted— 

Did he want Malfoy's company? Did he just want to justify being able to spend time with someone who had done so many awful things to him, to his friends? 

Was he, at last, actually lonely? 

"I know," Malfoy says, so quietly it's hard to hear him over the din of the pub, "that I was manipulated." His fingers twist together, a cat's cradle of pale knuckles. "But that doesn't un-hurt the people I hurt. Madame Rosmerta. Katie Bell. Weasley." Malfoy looks at Harry, a gaze so heavy Harry feels he might fall off his stool under it. "You." 

Harry swallows, hard and painful. 

"You're the first person, Potter, that I've been able to—what would you call this? Accountability?" And he looks at Harry as though he really means the question. 

"S-sure, yeah." Harry is adrift in the waters of this conversation; this Draco Malfoy, penitent and soft, somehow even self-aware, defies everything Harry's learned about him growing up together. 

"I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if I _can_ be better." Malfoy disentangles his fingers to scrub one hand through his lank hair. "I'm just—tired." 

"Well, cheers to being tired," Harry says, picking up his gross lager and holding it up. Malfoy blinks with surprise, then raises his wine glass to clink delicately against the brute of a glass in Harry's hand. 

"Shall I go on?" Malfoy asks, with a nervous smirk that tells Harry he's actually asking, as much as he's trying to be funny. 

"Oh, god, no," Harry says with a shudder, and when Malfoy's mouth starts to twist into a sneer—and that would be his expression for being offended, wouldn't it—he adds, "I just would like to come to the pub to have a pint, some grey stew, and, er, some light conversation." 

"Light conversation." Malfoy's brows reach for his hairline, which is saying something. 

"I know, I know, I started it." Harry takes a pull from his glass and shudders again. "God, this lager. Might as well be drinking cold piss." 

"Something you're familiar with, Potter? The taste of piss?" Malfoy's brows manage to climb even higher, the corners of his thin lips tugging upward. 

"Oh, bugger off. What I was trying to say is I know I brought up the past, and now I regret it." He wiggles the glass on the bar, watching the beer splash from side to side. "Not because I don't believe that you're sorry—I do, and I'm glad to hear it, I really am. But I came here to get away from thinking about the war, and people getting hurt, or dying." 

"You did bring it up," Malfoy agrees, but he takes a sip of his wine, his eyebrows finally returning to their rightful place above his pale eyes. 

"Tell me what you do for work," Harry says, forcing down another gulp of lager. 

"I don't work." Malfoy shrugs. "No one will hire me on. No one will let me open a place of business, either. Pick a different topic if you want light conversation, Potter." 

"Lord help me. Why don't you pick one, Malfoy? Seems like you know all the pitfalls I can't see in this conversation." 

"Quidditch, then. Puddlemere's going to take the cup this year, I guarantee it." 

"Puddlemere!" Harry gasps in mock outrage. "Do you actually think that, or do you assume they'll win because all their recruits are high profile every season?" 

"Oh, who do you bet on, then? Those blasted Chudley Cannons your blessed Weasley loves so much, I'll wager." 

Harry snorts. "Not likely! I'm a Kestrels man now that I've grown up." 

"Harry Potter, rooting for green," Malfoy laughs, throaty and strange in a way that takes Harry out of the moment for a few seconds. "Who would have guessed?" 

As it turns out, Quidditch was the right answer for light conversation, because somehow by the time Harry's finished his stew and lager and successfully ordered a stout to follow it all, neither man is finished talking about the game. On Harry's third pint, they've shifted to talking about Hogwarts Quidditch; Hufflepuff has been dominating all year, much to everyone's surprise; Slytherin and Gryffindor, in fact, seem to be battling it out for last place, much to both their chagrin. 

"Wretched," Malfoy moans. 

"Depressing," Harry agrees. Then he convinces Malfoy to share a boot with him, because if they're on holiday they should try weird novelties, and because it's massive. The barkeep only agrees because they're not fighting this time. 

"This is ridiculous," Malfoy snorts as the glass boot arrives in the barkeep's grouchy embrace. "Why did you get this, Potter?" 

"Because you agreed to help me with it, and we're on bloody holiday," Harry slurs. Also, and he won't say this one out loud (he hopes), because Malfoy seems so much less drunk than Harry, and that's not fair. 

"This is massive. You don't have enough room in your body for this much liquid." 

"That's why you're helping me with it, idiot. If we split it, it's only, er..." He holds up his fingers, but fails to count on them. "What, three? Three pints." 

"You don't drink a lot when you're not on holiday, do you?" Malfoy says with a smirk. "My god, Potter, I don't even know how to begin with this—this _object_." 

"Well, Malfoy—" Harry starts reaching for the boot. "Hey! I drink." 

"Please, we're not teenagers. I don't care if you drink." Malfoy rolls his eyes with his whole head this time, proving he's at least closer to drunk than to sober. "Go on, show me up. Take a drink from this godforsaken thing." 

"Fine." Harry pushes his hands up his arms, rolling up sleeves he's not wearing, because he's in a T-shirt. "Look, Malfoy. Look. Look." He puts both hands on the boot, and lifts it with a grunt. "You just—oh, fuck." Golden ale spills over the considerable rim, splattering Harry's shirt. 

"You just what? Pour it down your front?" Malfoy cackles. "Dignified, Potter!" 

"Shut up!" Harry raises the stupid boot to his mouth, clacking his teeth painfully, and barely has to tip it before he's gulping down mouthfuls of beer, foam painting itself across his upper lip. "There!" he says with a gasp, when he's drained a couple inches out of the thing, and wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. "Now you." 

"With considerably less mess," Malfoy asserts, accepting the chalice of stupidity from Harry. He plants his mouth on the opposite side of the rim, which looks like it's pushing his jaw into his neck, and takes several hard gulps of his own. "See? I—" 

Harry gives the top of the boot a push, and beer sloshes violently over Malfoy's face, who screeches. 

"Do that one more time and you're out, with no boot!" the barkeep hollers from the other end of the bar. 

"Worth it," Harry says with a wicked grin as Malfoy struggles to put the boot down while blinking away the beer threatening to get into his eyes. 

"You motherfucker! You inbred buffoon!" Malfoy splutters as he feels for napkins. 

"Let me guess, your father will hear about this?" Harry snickers, pressing a wad of napkins into Malfoy's questing hand. 

"Shut up. Just shut up." There's a sharp note in Malfoy's words that doesn't feel right for the playful, drunken back-and-forth they've got going on, but Harry doesn't have time to dwell on it, because it's his turn at the boot and he won't be outdone by Malfoy. 

Harry feels sorrier than he has in a long time by the time he and Malfoy reach the bottom of the boot, which they should have never done. The world is spinning with every step, and Malfoy is no help, finally intoxicated enough that any difference in sobriety between him and Harry is negligible. 

"I ought to ban the both of you," the barkeep remarks as Harry and Malfoy make their staggering way outside. "You're going to feel like shit in the morning, mark me!" 

"Don't you wish!" Malfoy bellows, running into Harry because he's taken a moment to turn his shouting mouth in the barkeep's direction. "Move it, Potter!" 

"Don't tell me what to do!" Harry snaps in return, despite continuing to move through the door. 

"Ugh, you reek of beer," Malfoy sniffs as they fall back against the broad side of the pub outside. 

"Really? Because you stink of it," Harry says. "Dizzzgraceful, Malfoy." 

"I'm already good and disgraced. It's you who's in danger of being discovered for the lout you are." 

"I'm not loud!" Harry shouts, and Malfoy winces. 

"A lout! You're such a lout you don't even know what one is!" 

"No, you just didn't say it right, I know words!" Harry insists. "Stop being mean to me, Malfoy, I'm drunk." 

"I'm drunk, and I'm myself, so no, shan't." Malfoy staggers despite leaning up against the side of a building. "You chose to drink with a notoriously mean man. This is what you get." 

"I didn't choose anything, you showed up after dragging me hither and thitter. Thithser. Hither and _yon_ all day." 

"Is it a crime," Malfoy says, sinking slowly down the wall to sit in the grass, "to want a bit of company because it turns out you're just as alone as you ever were?" 

"Oh, stop, I said I wanted light conversation," Harry groans. His attempt to join Malfoy on the ground ends in him simply falling, and having to gather himself into a sitting position. 

"I don't do bloody light conversation when I'm drunk, especially not now!" Malfoy snaps, swaying even sitting. "I'm a notoriously dramatic queen!" 

"You think you're notorious for everything," Harry snorts. 

"I am." Malfoy crosses his arms petulantly. "Everyone knows me." 

"Light conversation," Harry insists. "Crushes you had in school." 

"How is that light? That's soul-baring stuff, Potter." Malfoy pauses. "So you go first." 

"Soul-baring is what you do when you're drunk," Harry says, holding up his hand to count poorly on it again. "I had, uh—" 

"Do you want soul-baring or do you want light?" Malfoy interrupts. 

"I want anything that isn't the bloody war," Harry spits. "Cho Chang, in fourth year. Ginny Weasley, sixth year. Er, Luna Lovegood, for a bit of fifth year," he adds. 

"Oh, how dreadfully heterosexual of you," Malfoy chuckles, head lolling from shoulder to shoulder. 

"What's wrong with that?" Harry wants to know. "Weren't you and Pansy Parkinson a thing?" 

"Pansy?!" Malfoy says with a hearty guffaw. "She was as much my beard as I was hers. No, Potter, we were not a _thing_ unless you count being in the closet together as a thing." And then, "Blaise Zabini. I had a massive crush on him." 

"I don't think I ever saw you speak to him," Harry says, frowning so hard his eyes cross. "Always with Grabbe and Coyle." 

"Well, I was too bloody embarrassed, wasn't I?" Malfoy says, not bothering to correct Harry. "He wasn't impressed by me. I couldn't very well just fucking talk to him, when all I knew how to do was brag or be cruel." 

"There's no fucking light conversation with you, is there?" 

"You said you didn't want war talk, and that we ought to bare our souls when drunk, and I'm obliging. Make up your mind." 

"Fine. Fine." Harry waves his hand. "Er, Cedric. Cedric Diggory." 

"War talk, Potter!" 

"No! No. No, I mean—" Harry slaps his hand over the whole of his face, dragging it down and setting his glasses askew. "Third year. Straight into fourth year. God, I thought he was fit." 

Delight spreads across Malfoy's face, and he slides even further down the wall as he laughs helplessly, until his whole long body is laid across the grass, his head propped against the base of the wall. "Merlin, do you mean it?" Malfoy asks, still laughing as he wipes at his eyes. "Or is this because I called you drrreadfully heterosexual?" 

"No!" Harry protests, and he shoves at Malfoy's shoulder, but given Malfoy's already on the ground, it doesn't do much. "I mean it, I just—didn't tell anyone, given I barely had a chance with Cho." 

"Who knew, all this time," Malfoy says, suddenly fixing Harry with a malicious glint in his eye, "you'd been in the closet right alongside me?" 

"They ought to put a light in that closet," Harry says, thinking absently of his cupboard. Suddenly his exhaustion envelops him, alcohol and a long day of hiking up and down a mountain and an early morning all crashing together to make him long for his bed in his cottage. He opens his mouth to say they ought to get a move on—

"I don't suppose," Malfoy murmurs, "that you ever thought I was fit." 

Harry looks at Malfoy, at his high forehead, his pointed chin, his thin, pale lips. "No." Because a cruel spirit was and is the ugliest thing, to Harry. 

"I see." Malfoy's sudden reticence is so laden with—oh, Harry's too drunk to properly identify the emotion, but it's not fun, and he's too drunk for that, too. He looks at Malfoy again. 

"Not in school, I mean." 

"Don't do that." Malfoy's eyes shine in the wan light cast by the half moon above, and Harry realizes he's leaning over him. The better to see his face, his reactions, he reasons. 

"Do what?" From this angle, Harry can really study Malfoy's face in a way he never did in school. A short, angular nose; a deep cupid's bow set into lips that seem fuller when parted, as they are now; close-set eyes that give Malfoy a determined look. 

"Take fucking pity on me." Malfoy's voice is so small, even as fierce as his words are. 

"I'm an honest person," Harry says, with a shrug that nearly topples him. "I don't know that I've ever taken pity on anyone." 

Malfoy glances down, then back up at Harry. "I suppose that's true." 

"Were you just fishing for compliments, then?" Harry says, his smile lopsided with alcohol. "Git. Suppose I should ask you if I'm fit, let you get out that long list of insults." 

"Oh, Harry. I've always known you were gorgeous." 

Malfoy is soft, soft in every way, his searching eyes, his pliant body laid out on the earth, Harry's whispered name on his tongue. Suddenly Harry is seized with a vision of Malfoy reaching for him, of Harry letting him, of _kissing Malfoy_ —

Harry's glasses, already at wrong angles, fall off Harry's face and hit Malfoy right between the eyes. "Ow! My god!" 

"Sorry! Sorry," Harry says, collecting his glasses as quickly as he can without poking Malfoy in the eye. 

"I knew you had it out for me," Malfoy says, putting a woeful hand to his forehead. "Even now, when we're old and grey, you make an attempt on my life for grudges you can't leave in our sordid, sordid past." 

"Oh, shut up," Harry sighs, and he starts pawing at the wall in an attempt to haul himself up. Malfoy rolls away onto his belly, and then has about as much luck as Harry in getting to his feet. It takes them both a few minutes. 

"I'm going to go try to not walk into the wrong bungalow," Malfoy says, squinting at the houses in the near distance. "I'd advise you to do the same, Potter." 

"Suppose I'll find out in the morning if either of us succeeded," Harry replies. "Er, goodnight, Malfoy." 

"And a fare thee well to you, too," Malfoy says dryly, before turning around too quickly, stumbling a few paces, and then weaving his way to a house off to the left. 

Harry is left to try to find his own cottage, Malfoy's words swirling in his beer-soaked brain. _I've always known you were gorgeous._

⚘

The barkeep was right. Harry feels awful in the morning. Not hungover, he insists, because it doesn't line up with all the descriptions he's ever read or heard of a hangover; his head isn't thumping, nor does it feel turned inside out. But he feels sluggish, his mouth dry with a belly full of nausea. He stares at his hiking boots, knowing he'd wanted to go exploring this morning, and turns over in bed, giving the day up as a wrap. 

Wherever Malfoy might be, Harry doesn't see him at the pub that night for supper. He doesn't run into Malfoy anywhere the next day, either, or the day after that, and he supposes that's about right—he went weeks without seeing Malfoy before finding him at the pond, and it took him several days to run into him again in the mountains. 

And yet—some small part of him had hoped Malfoy would come find him. 

He tells himself, as he leaps from rock to rock in a valley, that it's for the best; one night of heavy drinking does not a friend make, nor does it make Malfoy a good person. He reminds himself, looking up at the endless sky over the grasslands, that he already has friends, waiting for him outside of his vacation bubble. Whatever connection he made with Malfoy is irrelevant. Unnecessary. And not just because he thought about kissing Malfoy. 

Harry had been drunk, so it doesn't count. That's another thing he tells himself. Anyone would feel like kissing in the scenario they'd found themselves in. Soused, alone in the dark, each revealing their attractions to men—a recipe for poor decisions like making out with a childhood rival. 

He shivers out in the moors when he thinks of the words _making out_. Then spends several shameful minutes imagining what it might have actually been like, followed by hours of flipping between berating himself and insisting it didn't mean anything because it was just a thought. Just a long, extended thought about someone with no redeeming qualities except for his dry humor, his desire to be better, his long legs—

A knock at his cottage door interrupts Harry in yet another one of these loops of overthinking the very idea of Malfoy, and he goes as hot in the face as if he'd been caught wanking under the sheets. He leaps from his seat at the tiny kitchen table, and clears his throat. "Yes, er—who is it?" 

A pause, and then Malfoy's nasal voice rings out, "Salazar fucking Slytherin, who else? Are you going to open the door or must I stand here all morning?" 

"Just for that, yes. Stand there all afternoon, too, for all I care." Harry splashes cold water on his heated face at the kitchen sink, hoping he's buying himself enough time. Maybe Malfoy won't know a blush on dark skin when he sees one. "Come back when you're Godric Gryffindor." 

"Potter, open the damn door!" 

Harry feels his face with the back of his hand; still pretty warm, but he thinks all the most damning signs of his shame have faded. "What are you going to do, break down the door for the pleasure of my company?" 

"What an excellent point you've made. I'll just wander off into the wilderness on my own and see if I ever come back, no Harry Potter required." 

At that, Harry finally tears the door open. "Malfoy. Don't tell me the only times you've gone out into the park were the times I ran into you." And then he loses his train of thought entirely, too taken aback by Malfoy's appearance. 

"I don't know why you're looking at me like that," Malfoy scowls. He's wearing shorts hemmed to mid-thigh, his skinny legs blindingly white, all the more reflective for the dusting of platinum blond hair that runs the length of them. Everything else Malfoy is wearing—a short-sleeve button-down shirt, his same boots with transfigured barely-there treads, a hat that looks like a pith helmet's second cousin—is somehow still second to the spectacle of his shorts and bared legs. 

"You're going to get ticks," is all Harry can manage. 

"I am not." Malfoy thrusts his chin out in a challenge. "I've an excellent repellent charm." 

"I was trying not to say you look like a twat, but you've forced my hand," Harry says, planting one fist on his hip. "So." 

"I am elegance and style," Malfoy huffs. "You wouldn't understand. Everything you wear out here is overdesigned and has the color palette of the inside of a diaper." 

"Who sprained their ankle after nearly tobogganing down a mountain on his face?" Harry counters. "Also, you look like a photo of someone's great-granddad about to go on safari. All you're missing is your blunderbuss." 

"My what?" Malfoy looks scandalized. "What is that, some kind of Muggle sex thing?" 

" _Why_ is that your first guess?" Harry wants to know. "Yes, Malfoy, it's a Muggle sex thing, Muggle pensioners really get hot for a bit of blunderbussy." 

"You're mocking me." Malfoy's frown is so exaggerated Harry snorts. "Are you going to keep me from being instantly lost and consequently dying from exposure in the Gaelic wilderness or not?" 

"I have to ask, again," Harry says, shifting from foot to foot as he tries not to laugh any harder, "have you been staying here for an entire month so far with nothing but a guided tour, an interrupted swim, and a failed attempt at hiking under your belt? Have you just been sitting in your cottage for weeks?" 

"Oh please," Malfoy says, and doesn't answer the question. "Don't make me beg for your assistance, Potter." 

"I already know you don't need it. You can Apparate anywhere you like, including right back here once you've inevitably fallen into a bog with no other escape." 

"Fine! Fine." Malfoy makes a great big show out of crossing his arms, rolling his eyes, and sighing dramatically. "I was hoping for a bit of company. There, are you happy?" 

"Company?" Harry lets a smirk steal across his face. "From me, Harry Saint Potter? You're not afraid I'll get all sanctimonious on you?" 

"It's you or the idiots in the rest of these shacks who won't give me the time of day because of my particular surname, so don't get too excited." Malfoy uncrosses his arms just to cross them again. "Give me an answer." 

"I don't know, I'm not feeling very flattered, and you know how much my ego needs stroking." Harry makes himself face the wall rather than Malfoy, because he's feeling dangerously exhilarated, grinning wide and bright. Is he _flirting?_ He can't be, but he thinks he remembers flirting feeling like this. 

"Potter!" 

"You just want me to say yes." 

"Well, obviously, or I would have left by now." 

Harry considers giving Malfoy a flat no just to see how he'd take it, but the truth is he _would_ like to go out about now. "Alright. Fine. Let me go get my diaper-palette gear, then." 

Malfoy, of course, comments yet again on how ugly Harry's boots are, and has a particularly dramatic reaction to Harry tucking his cargo pants into his socks to ward against ticks. "Hideous, unacceptable," Malfoy says as he casts his insect repellent charm on Harry. "Undo that at once." 

"If you're going to do that, I'm going to do this," Harry says, and before Malfoy can say another word, Harry's pointed his wand at Malfoy's boots and given them real traction, as well as bulking them up with a cushiony lining that ought to protect Malfoy's feet and ankles better. 

"You've made them horrible!" Malfoy says, even as they set out. "You owe me a new pair of boots, Potter, and my tastes don't come cheap." 

"Oh, please, you can put them back later," Harry says, scanning the paths ahead. "Let's go this way." 

"They'll never be the same. I thought you knew that about transfiguration, Potter." 

"No, I don't know anything, you know that. I'm a lout who only knows how to cast Expelliarmus." 

"So it's true what they say. Dumbledore and McGonagall kept you in the castle for your celebrity status even though you should have been expelled first year for failing all your classes." 

"That's right." Harry is already pulling ahead of Malfoy, his legs stronger, his footing more sure. "Keep up, Ferretface." 

Malfoy doesn't reply to that one, and Harry bites his lip—his undersocialized childhood coming to bite him in the arse yet again. He can never quite feel out how far is too far. He glances over his shoulder, but instead of catching Malfoy moping, he sees Malfoy's paused to pull something out of his pack. "Oi. What're you doing?" he asks, finally stopping and turning back toward Malfoy. 

"Documenting." Malfoy produces a wizarding camera, albeit one much smaller than the big-bulbed hunk of metal Colin Creevey used to drag around Hogwarts. 

"Well, can't say I blame you," Harry says, looking around at the majesty of nature that surrounds them. "Wish I'd brought one, now." 

"No, Potter, not the woods. It's for blackmail." And Harry turns back, mouth slack with surprise, just in time to get caught with the flash of Malfoy's camera. 

Harry sprints for Malfoy, shouting, "I'm going to open up the back of that thing!" Malfoy cackles, taking off sideways with surprising ease. It doesn't take Harry long to catch up, though, and he wraps himself around Malfoy's back, reaching from both sides to try and grab the camera Malfoy clutches to his chest. "You're going to sell that to the Prophet!" 

"Buy me dinner," Malfoy pants, winded already, "and I'll consider keeping it in my private collection instead!" 

"What?" Harry drops off Malfoy instantly, backing up a few quick paces. 

"I mean—" Malfoy seems to frown at his own nose, blinking so fast Harry worries, for a moment, that something's wrong physically. "My god, Potter, I'm only joking. No need for your gay panic." He takes a sharp turn of his heel and marches off, his whole body stiff with offense. 

"Wait, Malfoy—" Harry jogs to catch up. 

"Please, I'm too sober to discuss your sexual confusion in relation to my sad attempts at banter," Malfoy says, waving his free hand. "Entirely my fault for trying." 

"No, er, not that. I mean, maybe that, but also, you're going in the wrong direction." 

Malfoy stops, looking around with squinting eyes. "How is there a wrong direction? I want to look at nature, and lo, there is nature." 

"Yes," Harry sighs, "but if I'm your guide, and I want to take you to a particular location, then this is the wrong direction." 

"Oh." Malfoy's face is blank for only a moment, before it begins to curl with a devious smirk. "Why, Potter! Do you have a picnic blanket secreted away somewhere already?" 

"Yes, I was planning on laying you down on it, but I had to buy the biggest one they had to accommodate your massive head," Harry replies, hurrying past Malfoy so he doesn't have to school his face into passive calm anymore. His head is filled with images of pressing Malfoy into the tall grass, making his ears flaming hot, followed by his own mental voice shouting that these aren't his own thoughts—he's just alone with Malfoy and an overactive imagination, is all. If Ron and Hermione were here, he'd never consider it. 

Then again, one of the reasons for his solo holiday has always been to discover who he is without his best friends, or anyone else. 

"Another secret revealed," Malfoy says. "Harry Potter, the true romantic." 

"Oh, shut up, Malfoy. Keep up." 

Their day outside doesn't last too long; Malfoy's stamina is low, and he hadn't eaten a proper breakfast, either. They do make it out to the grasslands, though, and Malfoy snaps several more pictures that just seem to be of Harry looking awkward in the outdoors. "That one was just of my bum," Harry protests, at least once, but Malfoy just laughs devilishly and prances out of reach. 

Malfoy shows up again the next morning. And the morning after that. All those days after the pub night that Harry spent wishing Malfoy would come bother him, and now here he is, cursing Harry's doorstep day after day. Harry realizes it's always just after ten when Malfoy arrives. 

Their hikes get longer by the day, and what began as long stretches of silence interrupted by bouts of round-cornered insults become long chats about anything, seeded with deep truths. Harry learns that no, Malfoy's father never hit him, the way Ron said he must, but only because Lucius saw corporeal punishment as being for servants and poor people. He learns Malfoy's known he was gay since before he even came to Hogwarts, but even then he sensed it would cost him to say as much to anyone. He learns, and he would have seen it in the Prophet had he left for Ireland a day later than he had, that Lucius is dead. 

"I'm sorry," Harry says automatically, even though he's not. 

"I don't know if I am," Malfoy says, looking out over the horizon instead of at Harry. 

So Harry tells Malfoy about the Dursleys. About the cupboard under the stairs. The bloody spiders. The starvation, the isolation, never purposely beaten at length but never handled with care, either. The lies about his parents, about who he was. Malfoy is quiet as Harry talks, just as Harry let Malfoy speak. Harry doesn't want to talk about the war but the pain of how short a time he had with Sirius goes beyond the war. He doesn't discount the family he's found in the Weasleys, in Gryffindor, in all the survivors who care for him, but his most fervent childhood wish to simply be loved and cherished by a parent all his own seemed to die with Sirius. 

"When I have children, I'll make sure they never feel alone," Harry tells the sky, from their seat on a hillside, watching the sun go down on perhaps their tenth or twelfth outing. They'll have to go back soon, before the predicted rain comes through. 

"You want kids?" Malfoy sounds surprised. 

"Of course." In a life full of doubts, this is one issue where Harry is always sure. "Don't you?" The words come out before he realizes what he's saying. "I mean—" 

Malfoy inspects his hands, hanging between his loosely parted knees. "I could have a child, if I wanted, you know. Being gay doesn't mean I can't have or want a family, Potter." 

"I know that," Harry mumbles, despite having just shown his ignorance. 

"But yes, I think I do want a child someday." Malfoy brings one hand up to rest his chin on it. "Without all the ugliness of the pressure of continuing the family line. No Pureblood shit." 

Even when their conversation pauses, there's never silence, filled with the cacophony of birdcall, insect buzz, and whistling wind. 

"When did you know you wanted to make a change?" Harry asks. 

"If you mean 'do better,' then I can't say I can pinpoint it." Malfoy leans back. "You have one realization about something terrible you believed because your parents did, then another, and another, and suddenly you realize your perspective has shifted completely." 

"Crept up on you, did it?" 

"Something like that." Harry can feel Malfoy's eyes on him. "All I can do is try to keep up." 

"Bet you can do better than that," Harry offers. He plucks blades of grass from the space between his feet, rolls them between his fingertips until they become green thread. "Get ahead of it." 

"I've got to work on my stamina, then, haven't I?" Malfoy murmurs. 

Harry doesn't meet Malfoy's gaze, too afraid of the weight of it. Too afraid of what he'll find. Instead he looks up at the ominous clouds. "Rain's coming," he says. "We'd better pack it in." 

A pause from Malfoy, and then, "Right, hadn't we better." 

Harry avoids his eyes right up until they Disapparate, and what he sees there nearly splinches him.

⚘

Harry realizes, as he steps out the door of his cottage next morning, he doesn't know where Malfoy's cottage is, and his plan is already hitting snags. Malfoy's always come to him in late morning, and Harry's grown so used to the routine he's never tried to flip the script. 

So at nine thirty on a muggy morning, Harry hitches up the straps of the bag he's packed full, and fills his lungs for a good hearty bellow of, "MALFOY!" 

The result is instantaneous, which is good because Harry was honestly ready to keep shouting as long as he had to, regardless of the feelings of other vacationers. Malfoy bursts from a cottage three doors down, looking scandalized and rumpled in an unbuttoned shirt and damp hair. He stalks toward Harry, who strides ahead to meet him with an entirely unbothered energy by contrast. 

"Potter!" Malfoy hisses as he nears. "What do you think you're doing?" 

"I forgot which cottage was yours," Harry says with a shameless shrug. "I came to invite you out." 

"You numpty. I was coming over soon, same as I've been doing for nearly two weeks. Now I'd wager you woke up the whole village with your carrying on." Malfoy is trying so hard to look annoyed, but a smile keeps breaking through. 

"I shouted your name once, that doesn't count as carrying on, and a handful of holiday houses doesn't count as a village, either." 

"Anything you do counts as carrying on." 

"Enough," Harry says, holding up a hand. "I came to find you early because I don't want you putting on that sodding safari suit today. I've got different plans for us." 

Malfoy plants a fist on a jutting hip. "What should I wear, then, Potter, if not the clothes I brought specifically for outdoorsmanship?" He flaps his other hand. "Shall I go nude?" 

"Look—no— _here!"_ Harry plunges his hand into his bag and pulls out a pair of swim trunks he conjured last night. "Swimming. We're going swimming." 

Harry is gratified, at least, by Malfoy's stunned expression as he looks at the swim trunks. "You just—had this?" Malfoy asks, posture straightening into one of uncertainty. And then, "Where are yours?" 

"In the bag as well," Harry says, tossing the swimsuit at Malfoy and internally breathing a sigh of relief when he manages to catch it. He'd considered slapping the trunks against Malfoy's chest for comedic value, but Malfoy's shirt is still open, and wouldn't it be weird for him to just touch Malfoy like that, actually? 

Malfoy stares at the bit of nylon in his hands. "So what exactly is the plan, here, Potter? Am I meant to strip down in front of you to put these on, and then walk to the bloody pond barefoot?" 

"What? No," Harry says, but already he's realizing he'd been so gung-ho about getting out before Malfoy came over that he really hadn't thought this through. "Er—go change in your cottage, and..." He looks over his shoulder. "I'll go change in mine, and then we can Apparate to the pond." 

"I don't remember where that stupid pond is." 

"So I'll Side-Along you." 

"You didn't actually plan this, did you?" Malfoy asks, smirking. 

"Shut up, Malfoy. I plan things." 

"Just not this particular thing." His smirk grows wider, and it hasn't been so long since Hogwarts that Harry doesn't still want to slap it off his face, at least a bit. 

"Fine, then, you got me. I can't plan worth a damn." Harry grabs Malfoy by the wrist, snapping him close as he steps forward, and Apparates. 

Malfoy tumbles, gasping, to the banks of the pond. "Bastard! You bastard!" he shouts as he sits up, running frantic hands over the length of his body. "You don't just Side-Along someone without fucking telling them, Potter! You egotistical maniac!" 

"You're alright, aren't you?" Harry says, shrugging deeper than he means to, though his eyes sweep along with Malfoy's hands, checking for injury. "You haven't been splinched." 

"I could have been!" Malfoy retorts, shaking the swimsuit at Harry. "I ought to go right back to bed. Fuck your plans." 

Harry squeezes at the hem of his shirt. "Is that what you're going to do?" 

Malfoy pauses, looking at Harry with a frowning consideration, mouth open mid-complaint. He shuts his mouth firmly, and says, "No." Then he looks at the pond, the shimmering surface of it. "Seems like I never have a choice when it comes to you and this puddle. Either you're driving me out or dragging me in." 

It's true, Harry realizes. He never actually asked Malfoy if he wanted to come along, whereas even Malfoy bothered to wheedle Harry into a yes the first time he'd knocked on Harry's cottage door. "I—" He bites his lip. "I'm sorry. You really don't have to stay if you don't want to. I just thought—" 

"I don't _mind_ ," Malfoy says, getting to his feet. "I'm happy to be wanted, Potter. I'll go anywhere I'm _wanted_." 

Their eyes lock, and Harry feels frozen by it, pulled into the overcast skies of Malfoy's eyes like falling into another world. 

"I ought to, ought to change," Harry stammers, thumbing over his shoulder as he pulls his own trunks from his bag. "So I can see. Swim! So I can swim." He stumbles backward, clutching the trunks in two fists as Malfoy stares at him. 

Harry's face burns as he ducks behind a substantial enough tree and tears his T-shirt off. He doesn't know when he became so easily unseated by Malfoy simply _looking_ at him. He unbuckles his belt and undoes his fly while scolding himself for being such a fucking weirdo, and steps out of his jeans and shoes while imagining what his friends would say if they could see him getting so flustered over Malfoy putting emphasis on the word _wanted_ in his general direction. 

"For fuck's sake," he sighs to himself, and pulls off his underwear while simultaneously pulling his swimsuit on in the most strategic footwork he thinks he's ever managed. He should have just put the stupid trunks on under his jeans. And just as the trunks slide over the top of his arse, Harry hears the click of Malfoy's camera. 

"Malfoy!" Harry fumes, before he realizes he's still holding his briefs, and drops them into the pile of his clothing, kicking his shirt over them. 

"I told you," Malfoy says, looking positively demonic. "Blackmail, Potter." Harry notices, too, that Malfoy's altered his swim trunks. Unlike Harry's standard mid-thigh fit, Malfoy's now barely skim his legs at all, closer to a brief cut than shorts. They're also now silver and green. 

"I don't know what to even say," Harry says, squatting to shove his clothes into his bag, tucking his glasses into the folds of his shirt. "Taking naked pictures of me, shrinking the swimsuit I gave you down to a Speedo..." 

"It was only a bit of crack, which makes it funny, not naked," Malfoy says, counting off on his long fingers. "And I don't know what a Speedo is, but I'll tell you I thought what you gave me chafed awfully." 

"I really am going to destroy that camera when you least expect it," Harry tells him, straightening up with his hands on his hips. Malfoy takes another picture. "Hey!" 

"Not naked, were you?" Malfoy says, and he strides off, chuckling darkly all the way back to his clothes, where he folds his clothes around the camera. 

"Did you just have that on you, then?" Harry asks as he approaches the water. 

"Shrunken in my pocket, as a matter of fact," Malfoy agrees. 

"Interesting. Very interesting." Harry bolts toward Malfoy with such a sudden turn of speed that all Malfoy can do is yelp while Harry hurls him bodily into the pond, his flailing white limbs sailing over shallow waters and making a dramatic splash. 

Malfoy splutters as he comes up, spitting out water like a broken fountain. "Fuck you! Fuck you, Potter!" he shouts, treading water noisily. "Wait, no, no no no—" And Harry comes in right after him, having run the short length of the bank to cannonball in right on top of Malfoy. 

"Ugh!" Malfoy resurfaces with more water pouring from his mouth, his short hair curtained across his eyes. Harry can't stop laughing, barely able to see Malfoy through his crinkled eyes. "Is this what Gryffindors do for fun? Bruise each other?" 

"Yeah, something like that," Harry says, propelling himself forward to start swimming around Malfoy in slow, lazy circles. "Gets the blood pumping, Malfoy. What do Slytherins do, moan at each other about how life is bleak and nobody understands?" 

"Something like that," Malfoy echoes in a mutter, parting his hair and squeezing the water out of his eyes. 

Harry dips his head underwater, letting his wet hair cool him against the humidity and heat of the day. He lays back in the water, ignoring Malfoy for a moment as he takes in the canopy above, dappled with the early morning sky between its leaves. "You know," he murmurs, letting the windswept current of the pond carry him along, "it really is beautiful here, when you're not caught up in arguing with someone." 

There's no response, and Harry turns his head, wondering if Malfoy's gone under, or swum away—and startles, because Malfoy is so much closer than Harry thought. He's quiet, sunk down to his chin, eyes hooded as he keeps them trained on the surface of the water. 

"It is beautiful," Malfoy agrees. And his eyes flick up, meeting Harry's with such an intensity that Harry's breath hitches in a tiny gasp. 

Malfoy goes pink, cross-eyed with glaring at his own nose all of a sudden, and disappears underwater to resurface a few feet away, swimming doggedly for the center of the pond. 

"Drinking this morning before I came to get you, were you?" Harry asks with a nervous laugh, rolling onto his belly in the water to swim after Malfoy. 

"Don't know what that's supposed to mean," Malfoy says, without turning around. At this distance he's less of a man and more of a white blur, and Harry speeds up to bring him back into focus. 

"I—well, you know, you got all poetic about my, you know." He's saying _you know_ a lot. "My face." He gestures at said face with both hands, and ends up splashing himself in the mouth. 

"Don't tease me!" Malfoy snaps, turning suddenly to finally face Harry, and this close, Harry can see his face again—he's angry. Why is he _angry?_

"If that's what you call teasing, you've gotten a lot thinner skinned since we were children," Harry says, as frustrated as he is lost. "What am I even teasing you about?" 

"Oh, fuck off." Malfoy sinks down until his nostrils are level with the water, blowing tiny ripples across it, and swims a few more paces backward. 

"I don't even know what you're so upset about. I brought you out here as a sort of—I don't know, an apology for the last time, and because it's hot out and I thought you might like it. Not to argue over pointless, stupid things again." Harry paddles after Malfoy again. "Stop swimming away, it's not fair. I can't see." 

Malfoy bobs back up, an indignant buoy. "Not fair, Potter? Not _fair?"_ he says, slapping the water with both hands. "Not fair is you holding the things I've said to you over my head!" 

"I haven't talked about what you said at Hogwarts—" 

"No! No, Harry, when we were drinking!" Malfoy cuts across Harry, and the use of his given name alone is enough to stun him into subsiding deeper into the water. Then he thinks about what Malfoy is saying, and comes right back up again. 

"That's all in your head, if that's what you think I've been doing! I don't—why would I hold that over you? To what end?" 

"I don't know!" Malfoy hits the water again, this time sending up a spray that puts a curtain of droplets between them. "Fine! It was all in my stupid, sodding head. You win again." And he starts moving away again. 

Harry reaches out in an instant, his fingers wrapping around Malfoy's wrist beneath the surface, holding him in place. He can hear his blood in his ears, hear his wildly thumping heart. He doesn't know what he thinks he's doing, but— 

"Please," Malfoy begs, words in a plaintive murmur. "Please, please don't tease me now. You have to know." 

"I'm a lout," Harry replies, just as quietly. "Don't know anything except how to cast Expelliarmus, remember?" 

Malfoy chuckles softly, casting his gaze anywhere but at Harry—and then that isn't true anymore, eyes meeting Harry's again. Again, Harry feels that vertigo of being on the edge of another world, but his anxiety has turned to exhilaration. 

It's Malfoy who kisses Harry first. It's Malfoy who closes the gap between their lips, slowly, asking permission with his eyes and receiving his answer by way of Harry's closed eyes and parted mouth. Malfoy kisses softly at first, a second question in his tenderness— _Are you sure you want this? Are you sure you want me?_ Harry answers again by kissing back, pressing his _Yes, I'm sure_ against the heat of Malfoy's shuddering breath. 

Their kiss doesn't last, given that they're treading water in a part of the lake where their feet can't find the floor; the imbalance makes their teeth clack together, hard enough for Harry to exclaim a short "Ow!" Malfoy is quick to be mortified, but Harry takes a chance and rests his hands on both of Malfoy's shoulders, laughing as he puts his forehead to the other man's. It isn't long before Malfoy is laughing, too. 

"Maybe not the middle of the pond," Harry admits, "for a first kiss, then." 

"As first kisses have gone, that was actually my most successful," Malfoy admits in return. "But I don't think we should have any second kisses in the middle of the pond." 

"No second kisses?" Harry asks, trying to keep the nerves out of his voice, and trying to keep his soul firmly in his body when he reflects on his current reality of nearly pressing his body against Malfoy's, talking about _kissing_. 

"We could," Malfoy says, slowly, "try again, back at mine?" 

Harry's heart seizes, and if he thought he could hear his heartbeat before, it's nothing compared to the rolling thunder in his ears now. 

"Back at yours, then," Harry agrees, only barely regretting how little he got to swim as he follows Malfoy back to shore. 

There will be other days, with Malfoy. With Draco.


	3. Epilogue

Draco's hands-on work ethic in his garden doesn't apply in the kitchen. Vegetables, greens, and herbs from his garden are being chopped, sliced, julienned, minced, and chiffonaded all over Molly Weasley's kitchen with a few judicious waves of his wand. He pretends not to notice when Molly adjusts his kitchen magic, trying to take silent notes, instead. Molly's explanations have become increasingly meandering with age; sometimes she forgets what she was trying to teach in the first place, and tells an anecdote from the sixties instead. 

"Oh, Rose, Hugo," Molly says, looking up as the pair of Granger-Weasley children peek into the kitchen. Hugo goes wide-eyed and whips back out of sight, but Rose groans and forces her brother back into the room by the collar of his shirt. Draco snorts to himself as he checks on the pheasants roasting in the oven. 

"Hullo, Gran," Hugo says, pushing his sister away and grumbling. "Just wanted to see how the food's going." 

"Getting there, dear." Molly taps a cabinet door and it swings open, revealing precarious stacks of plates. "Would you get your cousin and set the table?" 

"Who?" Hugo asks, right before Rose elbows him hard in the ribs. "Ow! Rose!" 

"I don't know where Lily is," Rose says, glancing at her mobile. Magical children are apparently no more immune to the siren song of constant communication than Muggle kids, especially teenagers like Rose. When Draco was her age, the high concentration of magic in a place like the Burrow would have blown out a device like that, but advancements in the finally-named field of magitechnology have made it possible for the Burrow to have a television set that only the grandkids and Arthur watch. 

Molly pauses, clasping a tea towel between her hands and regarding her grandchildren over her spectacles. "Now, really." 

"Fine." Hugo huffs and shoves his hands in his pockets before heading out of the kitchen. Rose rolls her eyes and follows her brother. Draco watches them leave, biting his lip. 

"I don't remember Ron _or_ Hermione acting that way at that age," Molly sighs, before looking at the tea towel in her hand and seeming to remember what she was up to. "Draco, why don't you go join the other—" Molly frowns. "Not the children. The grown-up children." 

Draco can't help but laugh, his anxiety about the kids fading a little. "The grown-up children, even at forty years old. Seems apt." Draco's eyes flick around the kitchen. "Are you sure? Seems there's a bit more to do." 

"Oh, I'm more than capable, dear," Molly says, just as her husband wanders in. "Besides, Arthur's here. I won't be lonely." 

"What have I done?" Arthur asks, pausing with trepidation. 

"Nothing yet." Molly points at the sink. "Will you set those to wash, Arthur?" 

"Suppose I can," he says, making a great show of pushing up his sleeves and rolling his shoulders before casting the very simple spell required. Draco shakes his head, and follows Molly's orders of heading out into the yard to join the other grown-up children, as she puts it. 

There's a knot of them standing by the end of one of two long trestle tables. The actual children are laying out plates on the other table, though Rose is moving in slow motion, one hand holding up her mobile so she can check it every other step. Draco notes there's three of them, to his slight relief; they don't seem to be talking, but Hugo and Rose at least didn't conveniently "forget" to include Lily. 

Lily looks up then, tucking a springy lock of hair behind her ear, where it won't stay. She looks more like Harry than Draco, with her brown skin and curly black hair, and her inky dark eyes are all her own. Of course, any ways she looks like either of her fathers are as coincidental as her name. It was no cakewalk, applying for parenthood while Harry dealt with the extremely public fallout of quitting the Aurors and looking for a new, much less dangerous career, but the adoption finally went through three months ago.

Draco does his best to give her a broad smile on the fly, and she returns it with a hesitant smile that's much smaller, fluttering off her face in a matter of seconds. Then she returns to her task of laying out plates, ducking her head down. 

He doesn't realize he's put a calming hand on his own chest until he's already approaching the chatting adults. 

Ron and Hermione are here, naturally. Luna and Ginny have come, but the twins have the weekend with Luna's amicably-divorced ex-husband. Neville has come alone, holding his beer with two hands and listening to the main conversation with a nod so constant it might as well be set to a beat. Blaise and Pansy have made it, as well, and Draco prays Pansy hasn't said anything too wicked. He holds no such hope for Blaise. 

And there's Harry at the center of them, gesticulating emphatically. Probably talking about the kids at the Muggleborn preschool, where he's been working for most of the past year. Harry glances Draco's way as he joins them, and gives Draco a wide smile that even now sends a jolt through Draco's heart. Draco was right; Harry's telling a story about the preschool's latest addition, who has an unhelpful predilection for jumping six feet high to grab her astonished parents' most interesting breakables, as well as clear baby gates. 

Harry goes on with his story, Draco sipping his butterbeer at the edge of the conversation. He heard this story yesterday, but he laughs along with his friends at just the right points, in case Harry's forgotten he told Draco already. Even when what Harry forgets is easily categorized as natural, human, even middle-aged forgetfulness, reminders of it just breed anxiety and irritability that can spiral quickly. Ron started a story with the words _Remember when_ at the first Burrow dinner after Harry's completed Legilimency healing, and although Harry wasn't the only one who didn't have a clue what Ron was talking about, the evening was ruined in seconds. Harry's fear and anger devolved into a crying, shouting meltdown; Draco had to practically throw his husband through the Floo and follow him home. 

"...And her parents told me they were literally tying sandbags to their three year old's ankles!" Harry says, laughing. In this moment, there's no trace of the man who sobbed on his knees because he couldn't remember an anecdote about Ron learning to change a car tyre. Everyone laughs with him. Pansy's laugh is more of a cackle. 

"You're disgusting," Blaise murmurs as he sidles up to Draco, swirling the wine in his glass with an elegant gesture. "Stop looking so soppy where people can see you, or I'll simply have to pour this down your front." 

"I'm not looking soppy. I'm looking intrigued by a story I've certainly never heard before." Draco looks at Blaise's glass properly. "Besides, I've never known you to waste that much wine." 

Blaise grimaces. "How many times?" 

Draco shrugs. "This is only the second time. And he's embellishing more. I believe the children would call it the director's cut." 

"My god, you sound so old," Blaise snorts into his glass, before taking a sip. "'I believe the children would call it,' he says. Embarrassing." 

But Draco is back to watching Harry, losing himself in consideration of how far his husband has come. 

It took Harry and Draco two days to go through the photo album together, mostly because Draco was still dehydrated and woozy. When Draco refused to go back to bed and get proper rest because he absolutely _had_ to finish this task, Ron aggressively tucked him in up to his chin, leaving Draco as a furious disembodied head at the top of the duvet. 

Yet Harry saw the breadth of their love in those photos. He saw his own happiness, as well as Draco's. He heard their stories in Draco's trembling voice. And he made his decision. 

Their love is different. They both know it. As much as Harry remembered after the treatment, each moment of his life with Draco as fresh as if he'd just lived it, there's no unremembering five years of fearful solitude. Well—there might be for any other wizard, but for Harry, even the smallest memory charm would be a puff of breath on the house of cards that is his mind. For Draco, there's no leaving behind five years being robbed of Harry, either. Sometimes Draco catches Harry looking as if his soul has gone out for a stroll, his eyes glazed over, his hands frozen halfway through some menial task or another, and when Harry returns to himself, there’s always a moment where he regards Draco as if he’s a stranger across the street. 

It’s only ever a moment. Only a few heartbeats of Draco reliving Harry’s undeath before Harry reaches for him, murmuring his name. 

"Alright, that's enough standing around." Molly's voice cutting across the yard heralds the arrival of the food, which makes its way to the tables in a jumbled midair queue. Harry, Ron and Ginny intercept the platters as they arrive, arranging them by hand; Molly's levitating charms don't have quite the accuracy they once did. Arthur appears with an armful of bottles of pumpkin juice and sparkling cider for the kids, and Draco darts over to help him set them down before he drops them all. 

"I'd pull your chair out," Harry says behind Draco, as everyone finds their seats, "but, you know. The bench is attached to the table." 

"Chivalry lives on," Draco says dryly, sliding himself onto the bench one leg at a time. Harry puts a quick kiss to the crown of Draco's head, right above the bald spot he tries to cover with strategic combing. Then he uses Draco's shoulder as leverage to get himself onto the bench, wedging in between his husband and Lily, who's pouring herself pumpkin juice and not speaking to anyone. 

Dinner goes as smoothly as any event with so many big personalities can go. Pansy holding a conversation with Molly at the opposite end of the table makes Draco absolutely tense, as does Blaise talking to Neville at the other table, but Harry squeezes Draco's thigh under the table and points out that nobody is shouting, or making faces. In fact, Blaise and Neville are talking about plants, while Molly and Pansy are having a barely veiled conversation about Pansy's attempts to conceive with her wife. The kids don't seem to be listening, at least, for which Draco is grateful. Rose seems to think the way she checks her mobile under the table top is surreptitious, and Hugo is monologuing to Lily about the Weasley family tree, not bothering to clear his mouth of food before he talks. 

"I'm going to take that thing away from her one of these days," Hermione mutters to Draco later, watching Rose bump her shoulder against the back door as she heads back into the house without ever taking her eyes off her mobile. He and Hermione sit on wicker garden furniture that surrounds a little fire pit, not far from the tables where they just ate. "When I was her age I was reading." 

"I'd say she's just like her mother, then," Draco snickers. "Nose stuck in a book, nose stuck in a mobile—she's reading something, isn't she?" 

"A load of rubbish is what she's reading! By the time I was fourteen I'd read _Hogwarts: A History_ back to front more times than I could count, _and_ I was reading advanced texts." 

"Where's that energy for Hugo, darling?" Ron asks, taking a seat on the wicker loveseat next to his wife, holding two hefty teacups of coffee. "He's a smart lad." 

"I know he is," Hermione says with exasperation, accepting a cup from Ron and immediately stirring it with nervous little clinks of the spoon that was on the saucer. "He's also not letting his brain leak out of his ears staring at a little screen all day." 

"Someone told me earlier today I sound old, but not as old as you just did," Draco says. Harry comes out with identical coffees for him and Draco. "Harry, did you—?" 

"Dash of cream, no sugar, five seconds of a cooling charm and no more," Harry recites proudly, as Draco takes the cup Harry holds out. "Yes, Draco, I did." And Draco hadn’t meant his question as a test of Harry’s memory, slipping up even now, but Harry is so pleased with even this small flex of his power of recall that Draco lets it be. 

"Draco was just telling me I sound like an old crone because I wish Rose would do something other than look at her mobile," Hermione says as Harry sits next to Draco, slipping his arm around Draco's waist. Draco leans into him, closing what little space is left between them. 

Harry shrugs at his old friend. "It's summer hols, Hermione. Besides, the kids don't like physical media these days, don't you know? She could be reading loads of books, for all you know." 

Hermione's mouth opens soundlessly, then shuts. "Well," she tries again, "I don't think it's good for her eyes!" 

"Neither was reading rotting old books by candlelight when you were only eleven, I bet," Harry volleys back, his grin crinkling his eyes dramatically. "We all end up in specs in the end, anyway." He points around the four of them, and he's right—where Harry used to be the only one in glasses, now all four of them have to wear glasses, though Hermione insists hers are only for reading and keeps them anywhere but on her face, which means she perpetually loses them. Draco's were new last year. 

"Fine. Fine. May my daughter never lift her head from that stupid phone ever again so my friends won't call me old," Hermione huffs, and takes an aggressive slurp of her coffee. 

"There aren't enough chairs out here," Blaise announces as he enters the yard with his cup of coffee, and duplicates the wicker furniture around the unlit fire pit until there's enough seating for all the adults behind him. 

After another hour and a half of conversation, during which Harry lights the fire pit and Arthur breaks out several packages of Jaffa Cakes, Draco spots Lily hanging about the back door looking both anxious and bored. He tugs on Harry's shirt, and nods in her direction. Harry takes a glance at their daughter, and nods at Draco in turn. 

"Well, we've got to get Lily home," Harry says, before stuffing the rest of the Jaffa Cake in his hand into his mouth and standing. 

"Oh, Harry, dear, she can stay the night with Rose and Hugo," Molly says. "You don't have to leave yet." 

"I don't think she's feeling especially social tonight," Draco says, trying to hit on a volume loud enough for Molly to not shout _What was that?_ at him but low enough for Lily to not hear. "But thank you, Molly." 

Of course, true to any gathering of 40-somethings who have known each other long enough, it takes Harry, Draco and Lily nearly another half hour to leave. Molly wants to ply them with leftovers. Harry gets into a Quidditch talk with Arthur, despite having talked plenty of Quidditch earlier. Draco has to pee, then he has to pee again after the Quidditch talk finally ends, which means Harry and Arthur strike it up one more time and Draco has to physically pull them apart. Neville asks Draco about how Maisie and the rest of the orchard are doing while he waits for Harry to get out of the loo in turn, and then it's Harry who's breaking up the conversation and insisting they're leaving, _now_. Then, of course, the endless parade of hugs and goodbyes that will have to be repeated for every departure after theirs. All the while, Lily is practically twisting by the door with her need to leave. 

They Floo back to the cottage in the order of Draco, then Lily, then Harry, because it simply makes sense to have a parent on either side to make sure Lily isn't kidnapped, so says Harry. Draco has no earthly idea what danger Harry thinks is lurking in their home or following them back from a Burrow dinner party, but it's not worth the argument. There are more than a few ways where Harry's hypervigilance endures, and will likely never end. 

"Well," Harry says as he steps through, flicking soot off his shoulder, "why don't we all relax and flip on the telly—" 

But Lily is already headed up the stairs. "Goodnight," she says softly, once she's halfway up, then turns back around to keep climbing. 

Harry freezes. 

"She hates me," he croaks, and behind Harry, Draco rolls his eyes. 

"She does not hate you. She's tired, overstimulated, and twelve. She's going to her room like any other twelve year old." He hooks his chin over Harry's shoulder and clasps his hands loosely over Harry's waist. 

"When I was her age," Harry says, swallowing, "I was desperate for any adult who would love me." 

Draco hesitates. "When you were her age," he says, at length, "you were an abused little boy who had only recently known what it was like to sleep in a real bed." 

Harry casts his gaze up the stairs. "She's an orphan, too." 

"It's not the same, Harry." Draco rests his cheek against Harry's curls, sighing. "Come on, let her be. We can watch a bit of telly before bed." 

For a moment, Harry doesn't move, still staring at where the stairs disappear into the ceiling. Then he sighs. "Alright. Off we go, then." He starts off for the sofa, Draco waddling behind him without disentangling himself from Harry. 

The television installed in their home doesn't get many channels, because having a Muggle cable man round would raise too many questions, but they have local stations, as well as the three wizarding channels that currently exist in the UK. Once Harry and Draco have thrown off robes and shoes and arranged themselves on the sofa, with Draco sitting between Harry's legs and pillowed against Harry's chest, Draco fishes the remote from underneath a cushion and turns the telly on to Wizarding Britain One. 

"Oh, god, really?" Harry groans, as the screen blares to life with the opening credits to _Cauldron! The Movie_. "Draco, no." 

"Well, I _was_ going to see what else was on," Draco says, letting a wide grin steal across his face. "But then I remembered how much I love Celestina Warbeck." 

"Molly loves this film. I can _not_ sit through it again." 

"Oh, but Harry, I'm so comfortable, and I've lost the remote," Draco says, dropping the remote to the floor where he could very easily pick it up, and where Harry couldn't reach it unless he sat all the way forward, dislodging Draco completely. "Besides, it's a classic." 

"It came out in 2010. That does not make it a classic. That makes it just something that has been plaguing me since the theater production first came out in 2006." 

"2005," Draco corrects, wriggling against Harry's chest to get even comfier. 

"Don't be a pedant, especially not for bloody _Cauldron_ ," Harry mutters, even as he slides a hand around to caress Draco's chin and cheek. 

"Are you going to throw me off so you can reach the remote, then?" Draco asks. He turns his face just enough to kiss Harry's thumb. 

"No, you've got me. I'm a lazy fool." Harry curls his upper body just enough to brush his lips against the very top of Draco's forehead. "Just don't sing along." 

"Only because Lily might be asleep," Draco half-agrees, his grin melting into a softer smile. Onscreen, Celestina herself sweeps into view, warbling about her cauldron full of hot, strong love. 

Their love is different, that much is true—a tree cut down to its roots by a single, vicious act. After everything, Draco's come to understand his marriage would never reset back to that morning when he last said goodbye to Harry. 

But the roots of their love are deep, and strong. And together, they make it bloom anew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a big big BIG thank you to the hd wireless mods for putting together a fest with such a fun theme and such a great selection of prompts! thank you again to my amazing and supportive alpha reader G, my talented and esteemed beta K/N, and my many cheerleaders who had no idea what i was up to but urged me on regardless. i hope this fic was as fun (or painful in the best ways) to read as it was for me to write!


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